On any given day, the city of Syracuse’s 37 schools can generate almost eight tons of notebook paper, food, milk cartons and other garbage. But this month students began taking out their own trash.

As a part of the Green Syracuse City School District program, which works to reduce the amount of trash produced and energy used in the district, students from the Hughes Elementary, McKinley-Brighton Elementary and Expeditionary Learning Middle schools will learn what is thrown out in their classroom garbage bins.

The “waste audits,” which began on March 11, will be performed several times leading up to an April 22 Earth Day celebration where students present their findings, said Dan Donato, a sixth grade math and science teacher at the Expeditionary Learning school. For the entire week of each audit, trash cans will be removed from every classroom and each student will be given a plastic bag to collect garbage in, Donato said.

The goal of the audits is to show the volume of waste produced and whether students follow recycling rules, he said. Ultimately, Donato said he hopes the students will change the way they think about trash and the importance of recycling.

“When they’re 11 years old, they think trash just disappears,” Donato said. “It’ll be smelly, but they’ll learn that if they reduce the amount of trash they create, it’ll be a lot less heavy.”

The audits are a part of the Waste Reduction Leadership Project, which encompasses both the trash examination and educational seminars through the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency. The project was funded through a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, Donato said.

After the trash is analyzed, Donato said, a representative from OCRRA will teach the students about eco-friendly waste removal. In the springtime, the waste collected during the audit will be used as compost to grow plants and flowers in the ELMS school greenhouse, he added.

Theresa Mandery, an OCRRA recycling specialist, said the organization tries to work with large, local waste producers to try to decrease the amount of trash they create. The SCSD is the largest school district in the county with over 20,000 children, she said.

Instead of contracting its waste removal to a third party such as Syracuse Haulers Waste Removal, the SCSD uses one or two trucks to pick up district-wide trash, said Mike Henesey, SCSD communications coordinator. These same district-owned trucks also handle snow removal for the schools, he said.

In a 125-pound sample of trash from one of the district’s garbage trucks, 17 percent of the waste, or 21 pounds, came from food, according to a 2010 study by OCRRA of SCSD’s waste. Composting food scraps can eliminate heavy materials from the district’s waste stream, “which, in a system where cost is based on weight, can be a significant financial benefit,” according to the report.

During a 180-day school year, composting food scraps could save the district more than $9,000, the report states.

“The issue has been some mix of cost and staffing in terms of really going for a large-scale composting program,” said Todd Rogers, program director of Green SCSD. “There’s an interest on the part of the district in pursuing that kind of programming.”

The OCRRA report also recommended finding alternatives for Styrofoam lunch tray and milk carton disposal, which accounts for about 12 percent of the district’s waste. Several schools used to collect and recycle milk cartons, but the practice eventually became unsustainable, Rogers said.

Donato said he is one of a few teachers in the district who have taken Green SCSD’s programs into their hands, organizing and implementing workshops, field trips and seminars. He and his students built a three-tiered composting bin out of wooden pallets, will visit a landfill in Madison County and have sold seedlings grown from their compost to the Syracuse Grows community gardens.

By the end of the programs, Donato said he’s found many students have adopted the composting techniques in their own homes.

Published on March 24, 2015 at 8:46 pm

Contact Annie: apalme05@syr.edu