Family and Consumer Sciences Classroom Composting

Have you read this article about school wide composting? As a Family and Consumer Sciences teacher I have lots of food scraps to dispose of. Compost saves twofold.  First, the food scraps are not sent to the landfill where they will produce methane gas that contributes to global warming.  Secondly, our trash can needs to be emptied less often because there is no stinky wet waste. That saves on plastic, and the world would be much better with less of that!

We compost scraps from our food labs in a bin outside of my classroom.  The foods scraps make up the "green" components of compost.  We shred newspaper, paper towels, paper flour sacks, and dryer lint when the pile gets too moist.  It never smells bad as long as we keep the 1-3 green-brown ratio.

I would love to have a school wide composting program but I can't even imagine the scale.  I think a good start would be for the students to recycle milk cartons. Perhaps if there was a dollar value attached to composting, as the article implies, my "powers that be" would be more interested. :)