School Zone: School cuts trash for a day

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on April 11, 2008

In addition to Bob Dylan, one of Minnesota's great exports is the state's forward-looking perspective on environmental issues, the inspiration for the elementary schools' Trash Free Lunch Day on April 18.

Amherst's recycling coordinator Susan Waite got the idea from The Land of 10,000 Lakes, as Minnesota is called on its license plates, and introduced it around these parts for the first time last year.

"They're a flyover state, so they don't get the press that the east coast and west coast does, but they really have done some wonderful things," Waite said.

Trash Free Lunch Day was a huge success last year, with schools greatly reducing the waste they produced that day. Students brought lunches with contents that could be mostly eaten, reused or composted and the cafeteria lunches went easy on plastic and Styrofoam.

The custodian at Wildwood Elementary School found that the school produced three barrels of trash the day before the trash-free lunch day and only a half barrel the day of it. That translates to a 68 percent reduction by weight and 83 percent reduction by volume. And as the trash disposal fees are calculated by the ton, weight reduction is key to keeping costs down, Waite said.

"This was just a casual measurement, but it was pretty dramatic. Even allowing for some fudging, it's still an amazing statistic," Waite said. "Parents thought it was great." Some of them showed up to help wearing "trash hats" with Styrofoam and chips wrappers.

Waite suggests waxed paper to people wondering how to make lunches more earth-friendly. "It's an easy way to avoid sandwich bags." Or use reusable plastic containers for carrots or cookies.

For more information on composting, Waite suggests a forum at Whole Foods in Hadley on April 16 at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., where area high school students, among others, will be talking about local composting efforts.

JETS

Amherst Regional High School's junior engineering club and its longtime advisor Val Veneman are the subjects of a feature story in the Junior Engineering Technical Society March news magazine, available online at www.jets.org.

The ARHS club, which has about 50 members, has participated for 20 years in one-day national competition called TEAMS. The goal is get students to work together to apply what they've learned in the classroom to real-world engineering scenarios. Competitions are held on college campuses around the country in February and March.

In the 20 years that ARHS has participated in TEAMS, it has been ranked in the top ten of its division in the national competition 18 times and over 700 students have participated, "a statistic few can rival," according to JETS. Some of the highlights are recounted in the magazine story, which notes that Veneman will be retiring this year.

One of the most interesting anecdotes involved the time the ARHS team showed up at one of the sites and there was no power. "The kids called on their ingenuity and creativity and totally rearranged the library space to utilize the natural light from the windows and had just complete Part I by the time help arrived to get the power on," Veneman recounted to JETS. "It was just one more example of students working as a team to solve a practical problem."

Substance abuse forum

The public is invited to a forum on substance abuse in athletics April 17 at the ARHS library, beginning at 7 p.m.

The event is being billed as a conversation to explore current state and school policy and how the community can address issues of substance abuse in athletics.

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.