Student Club Bringing Composting To Shorewood Intermediate School

SHOREWOOD, WI — A student environmental club at Shorewood Intermediate School will bring composting to their school's cafeteria in April, after spring break.

Students founded the initiative in 2020, but it was delayed by the pandemic. As the pandemic has begun to clear, a new round of students in the club have revived plans to bring services from composting company Compost Crusader to their school, according to Sarah Kopplin, a world geography teacher at the school and staff advisor for the club.

Kopplin said the interest in composting started just before the pandemic. Students in the club at the time were worried about their school's environmental footprint, and had felt they were throwing things out that could be kept out of landfills, she said.

Kids in the club started to research how the school could work to further reduce its environmental impact, Kopplin said, and after some chats with Compost Crusaders, students in the club worked to find data on just how much of the school's waste could be routed away from landfills.

After lunch periods, the students donned gloves and picked through trash to catalog what could be composted versus what should be recycled or thrown away.

"It was gross," Kopplin said. But through the grossness of it all, the students managed to figure out about 25 percent of the school's trash from lunch was consistently compostable.

But the school still had to figure out how to pay for it, Kopplin said.

Students did more research, collected more data, and discovered that if all the aluminum cans were taken out of the school's trash and recycling to instead be crushed and resold, it would offset the cost of the composting program.

The plans and research all came together, but then March 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Students transitioned to virtual classes, and for a while, most students were eating lunch at home.

As Shorewood schools transitioned back into face-to-face instruction, students in the club decided to revive the program, according to Kopplin.

Kopplin said the students had to re-verify the data that came from the initial trash-picking, again with gloves, but the project is finally coming to fruition.

Hope Conigliaro, a student in the club who has been closely involved in its planning, told Patch in a written statement the program is about reducing greenhouse gases.

"Landfills contribute to a large amount to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and so it’s best to reduce them as much as possible," Conigliaro said.

Coniglario said if a large portion of a community such as its schools can implement a composting system, it can reduce how much waste makes it to landfills.

"The more a community can reduce a landfill, the better, as landfills contribute lots to greenhouse gas emissions," Conigliaro wrote.

According to the EPA, municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions from humans in the United States. Landfills produced about 15 percent of the country's methane emissions in 2019, matching the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by more than 21 million passenger vehicles the same year, the federal agency said.

Compost Crusader has already delivered their bin for collection, and new compost bins will be showing up in the school's cafeteria after spring break, Kopplin said.

Everything is ready to go for the program, besides a few signs that need laminating. The next phase of the student club's project is to educate their peers on how to use the new bins and properly separate trash from recycling and compost, she said.

The club is working on making a video for that purpose to teach other students about why the program is coming, and how they can help it to run. Kopplin said the students have a vision of eventually going to the school board with ideas for a wider composting program in the district.