The fourth and fifth grade students at Grant Community School have been studying the interdependence of plants, animals, and humans, and our impact on the environment. We conducted a trash audit and found that 95 percent of our school waste comes from the cafeteria. Every day we throw away over 126 pounds of food waste. Our students have gone on a few expeditions to learn about recycling, and organic gardening; and decided that they wanted to help reduce the amount of trash we produce at our school.

Our goal is to reduce waste in the cafeteria by 50 percent. In order to accomplish this goal, we have started composting our food scraps. Our students have designed compost bins that they built out of recycled pallets. They created blueprints, made prototypes of their compost bins, and built the composters. We are now composting and will be able to use the soil in our school garden!

Story, photo, and videos, submitted by Sunshine Price, teacher at Grant Community School.