Leadership Field Trip

The day we returned to school after our Utah trip Chase had a leadership field trip.  I was asked to go along as a parent volunteer.

The purpose of the field trip was to take a tour and learn about how one school in our district has adopted a great way to reduce, reuse, and recycle their cafeteria food.  The kids were teamed up with a student who is a member of their "green team" who took them on a tour of the school to learn all about how this process works.  Chase was teamed up with a 6th grade boy named Conner.  He was really fun, and really knew his stuff.

They have a pretty great system that the school uses to recycle food.  They have pig buckets that they collect daily for a local farmer, and use another for organic foods that they use to make compost.  They then use the compost in their school garden.  We got a tour of the garden, and even got to taste some celery they were growing, it was delicious!

They clean and collect all the milk cartons to use for other things.  All these garbage bags are full of cartons they will recycle.  They said they went from throwing away over 200 lbs. of trash a day to just over 30 lbs.  That is a whole lot of trash.

During lunch the kids got a hands on of how the system works.  The thing that surprised me the most is how all the kids in the school are so use to this and know what to do.  They do have to occasionally do a dumpster dive, but this green team is not afraid to get their hands dirty.

This was a great way to learn about recycling, and how we can learn to reduce the amount of waste we put into the environment.  And making new friends in the process, major bonus!