This project involves five elementary schools within the Rockbridge County area, four of which belong to the Rockbridge County Public Schools (Central Elementary, Fairfield Elementary, Mountain View Elementary, and Natural Bridge Elementary) and one of which belongs to the Buena Vista City Public Schools (Enderly Heights Elementary). Collectively, these schools serve children preschool to fifth grade. During the 23-24 School Year, all five schools participated in daily, school-based composting through a Boxerwood program called Waste Busters, which is the focus of this application.
Boxerwood Education Association (BEA) is an environmental education nonprofit organization in Lexington, VA. BEA has a long-standing partnership with local schools, including the five schools involved in this project. This partnership includes field-based learning programs and related stewardship action projects.
Prior to this project, these five schools sent all waste, including food scraps and paper waste, to the Rockbridge Regional Landfill. Decomposition of food and paper waste in anaerobic landfills generates and releases methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (GHG) that contributes to climate change. Composting practices, on the other hand, eliminate most methane production. Thus, composting is a more environmentally friendly practice.
As part of the Waste Buster program, Boxerwood functions as a composting ally, supplying equipment, supplies, and ongoing coaching for each school. To that end, BEA provides 1-2 Earth Cube composting units for each school, for the purpose of creating compost from cafeteria food waste. The resulting compost soil belongs to the school that produced it, with the schools using the finished compost to support other ongoing school projects such as fertilizing school gardens or landscape projects. Implementing a composting program thus supports broader service-learning goals at these schools.
Using lessons learned from the previous year’s pilot at Natural Bridge ES, in the 23-24 iteration BEA worked with each school to customize a food waste collection system that would be both efficient and effective. While details vary, the general concept is the same at every school:
1) Orientation & Training: Boxerwood provides orientation to students through classroom presentations and initial, real-time coaching;
2) Ongoing Collection: staff help students sort their leftovers into buckets in the cafeteria at the end of each lunch. Either students or staff then immediately weigh the waste buckets, recording data in Waste Busters binders.
3) Composting: Student leaders (or staff) empty the full buckets into their composter (or in the case of Central, deposit the bucket to the school loading dock for farmer pick-up), then return the buckets to the cafeteria for cleaning.
Typically all students in 3rd through 5th grade participate in the Waste Busters program, though sometimes additional grades participated for portions of the 23-24 project period.
During the 23-24 school year, students at the five participating schools collectively diverted 7422.95 lbs of food waste from the landfill. This diversion is equivalent to preventing the release of 21 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Notably, the composters functioned well, with all food waste successfully converted to compost soil by the end of Summer 2024. With a successful food diversion/composting outcome, this project therefore generated 21 offsets.
