This year, in keeping with Rotary’s new area of focus, “Supporting Environment,” Ashland Reads created hardly any garbage when it served lunch to first-graders who participated in the annual literacy project.
Ashland Rotarians team up each spring to put on a celebration of literacy that includes performances, the gift of hundreds of books to elementary students, and lunch — grilled hot dogs and hamburgers with carrot sticks and fruit.
This year, students at Ashland High School, a local nonprofit composter, school staff, elementary students, and Rotarians all joined in to reduce plastic waste and to compost food scraps at the event, held at Ashland High School.
Here’s how it happened:
- To eliminate dozens of single-use plastic water bottles, students and volunteers were asked to bring their own water bottles. For those who forgot, there were compostable drinking cups and water pitchers that were filled from taps by AHS student volunteers from Interact, the high school Rotary group.
- To eliminate fruit cups, usually served in plastic single-serving containers, school district staff subbed in grapes, and volunteers snipped the bunches into small clusters just the right size for each student.
- To eliminate single-use plates and napkins, Rotary subbed BPI-certified compostable versions of both.
- To prevent food scraps from going to the landfill, students put their leftovers into special bokashi compost pails provided by Ashland Community Composting.
- To eliminate plastic clothes, a fabric tablecloth was substituted.
Napkins, plates, cups, and meat scraps, normally not allowed in composting bins, were accepted because Ashland Community Composting uses the bokashi method to break down these items.
Most so-called compostable dinnerware and napkins are NOT compostable in Ashland, as we do not have a commercial facility that can manage the high temperatures required to break down these items. The free farmers market food scraps drop off is vegetarian only, for example, as those scraps go to local farms. However, bokashi composting can handle meat and bones because it uses a fermentation method.
All the work paid off. Almost nothing from the celebratory lunch ended up in the garbage.
“It’s so wonderful to demonstrate to schoolchildren that we can reduce waste, if we work on it together, creatively,” said Candace Turtle, who founded the Environment and Sustainability committee at the Rotary Club of Ashland (lunch group).
“When we put food scraps into our landfill, we create methane, a powerfully polluting gas that occurs when food breaks down in anaerobic conditions. Methane is a key driver of climate warming. When we compost, we create rich soils that can be used to grow more food or plants that nourish people and the earth.”
Turtle noted that Ashland Community Composting had recently donated several cubic yards of composted soil to enrich the flower bed beneath an art installation outside Ashland High School. “It’s so nice to experience the benefits of recycling food — compost!” she noted.
Congratulations to all the volunteers, students, school staff, firefighters, and teachers who worked so hard to make this event green!
