Students Across San Lorenzo Unified School District Kick Off School Year with Commitment to Go Green
This year, San Lorenzo Unified School District is sending its students back to school with a promise to embrace the 4Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle and rot – and make keeping food scraps and recyclables out of the landfill a priority district-wide.
Last year, Colonial Acres Elementary School teacher Claudia McDonagh brought StopWaste’s Ready Set Recycle Challenge to her school, turning students into waste prevention specialists. Together with Oro Loma Sanitary District, San Lorenzo Unified’s Recycling Committee and the support of students, teachers and custodians, Colonial Acres reduced the amount of food scraps and recyclables it sent to the landfill from 80 to 15 percent. “The Ready Set Recycle Challenge has made our cafeteria a place where students are aware that compostables and recyclables are resources and that their choices make a difference,” McDonagh said.
By the end of the 2015-2016 school year, StopWaste and its partners had recruited five more schools to implement programs to keep food scraps out of the landfill – an average of six full bags of food scraps and recyclables per day to be exact. According to the schools’ custodians, the partnership between StopWaste, Oro Loma Sanitary District, Waste Management and Altamont Landfill helped them go from carting an average of eight bags to the landfill bin each day to two.
In May, inspired by the success of its six waste-reduction trailblazers, the San Lorenzo School Board voted to become a StopWaste Priority School District and committed to implementing waste diversion programs in all ten of its remaining schools. So as students across San Lorenzo pour back into the classroom this week, they’ll be greeted with the news that the science of garbage is now on the curriculum.
This post is contributed by a community member. The views expressed in this post are the author's.
