[GreenYes] Re: school food scrap collection program

["Dennis Sauer" <compostspecialist@no.address>]

Hi Karin,

We have a successful school composting program that serves 10 schools with
about 9500 students, as well as a business program that collects from
restaurants and supermarkets.  We send the scraps to a high quality
composter very particular about contamination.  His biggest beef at this
point is the presence of the stickers from fruit, which he occasionally
brings in to us in a baggie if we begin to slip.   Since the programs began
we have collected over 1000 tons of food scraps.  The programs have been
operating as pilot programs but now that they have been operating
successfully for 4 years we are developing them into sustainable programs
that will eventually serve all our 29 schools and be available to all the
businesses in our District.

We provide training, workplace information materials and our drivers are
trained to screen for contaminates.  When contamination is found the
generator is contacted immediately so steps can be taken to alleviate the
problem.  Our middle and high schools are the most challenging due to the
age and attitude of the students, but now that we have elementary students
working there way up the grades, we figure food scrap separation will
eventually become part of the school culture and require much less vigilance
on our part.  Of course this behavior spills over into the homes of the
students so we are developing an on-site food scrap diversion program that
will enable a significant number of our residents to manage food scraps at
in their own backyards.  You can learn more about these programs on our web
site, www.cvswmd.org  

Dennis Sauer
Compost Specialist
CVSWMD 

-----Original Message-----
From: GreenYes@no.address [mailto:GreenYes@no.address] On Behalf
Of Karin Grobe
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 8:41 PM
To: 'GreenYesL'
Subject: [GreenYes] school food scrap collection program


Elementary schools participate in the local food scrap 
composting program. They accept food scraps from the lunch period and are 
finding unacceptable levels of packaging in the collection containers, 
things such as plastic wrapping for fresh vegetables, straws, cracker 
wrappers, plastic utensils, etc. Training kindergardeners to fifth graders
to separate out these items is a challenge, as is convincing school kitchen
managers and administrators not to provide them in the first place. Can
anyone provide an example of a school food scrap composting program that has

figured out how to deal with/eliminate these and other such 
contaminants?






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