Composting is an activity which bring the school community together. From kindergarten age through high school, everyone can get engage. Composting taches respect to food and mother earth, helps grow food in vegetable gardens all students can enjoy. It closes the loop and helps student to understand how plant grow and if not fully eaten they rot to return the nutrients back to the soil. Composting is educational, but also supports and develops skills such as sorting, taking care of scraps when a bucket is full in cafeteria, managing compost, working in a garden, etc. It  teaches responsibility and makes student aware of wastes. Encourage them to decrease waste generation, but if not possible how to recycle as much of it as possible.

Guiding Principles:

1. Resources recovered: Waste is reduced; food scraps and other organic

materials are diverted from disposal and composted.

2. Locally based and closed loop: Organic materials are a community

school, and are generated and recycled into compost within the same

school community.

3. Organic materials returned to soils: Compost is used to enhance local

soils, support local food production, and conserve natural ecology by

improving soil structure and maintaining nutrients, carbon, and soil

microorganisms.

4. Community-scaled and diverse: Composting infrastructure is diverse,

distributed, and sustainable; systems are scaled to meet the needs of a

self-defined community.

5. Community engaged, empowered, and educated: Compost

programming engages and educates the students in food systems

thinking, resource stewardship, or school sustainability, while

providing solutions that empower students

to capture organic waste and retain it as a community resource.

6. Community supported: Aligns with school goals (such as healthy

soils and healthy people) and is supported by the students it serves.

The reverse is true too. A school composting program supports

schools social, economic, and environmental well-being.

Raises Awareness

• Exposes students to the concept of source-separation of food scraps

• Educates children about composting, how it is done, and

how it can be incorporated into everyday life

• Creates advocates and the necessary leadership for changes in policies, laws, and

regulations

• Prepares the next generation for full-scale composting as part of our way of life

Environmental Benefits

• Creates a rich nutrient-filled soil amendment

• Enhances soil fertility

• Improves soil structure, thus reducing storm water runoff and soil erosion

• Substitutes for energy-intensive fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides

• Improves plant growth, and thus carbon sequestration

• Reduces waste

• Protects the climate by cutting landfill methane emissions and creating a carbon

sink in soils

• Reduces vehicle emissions by decreasing transportation distances between

material generators and compost producers and users

Community Benefits

• Allows for a school operation

• Builds the culture and know-how of composting in school

• Keeps resources and money changing hands within the school

• Builds healthier soils

• Promotes human-scale technology, instead of large capital intensive systems

• Supports locally-grown, healthy food production, and “closed-loop” systems