More of a Science Than You Would Think: What Our Fifth Graders Found When They Weighed the Lunch Trash
Updated: 2 days ago
By Devin Burkhart and Chrissy Morley, Grade 5, Marion Cross School, Norwich, Vermont
One of our students told an interviewer this spring that she had discovered she has a passion for composting. Her evidence: when she sees somebody throwing a banana peel in the trash, she said, what goes through her head is "no, no, no, no, no."
That is a fair picture of where our fifth graders started this year. It is not where they ended up.
Chrissy:
It is worth saying that this program did not arrive fully formed. A few years ago we did not have a compost palace. We did not even have a recipe. It was really ineffective composting, and mostly the adults were doing it.
Now the fifth graders run the thing. They know which bin does what, they know why it has to be turned, and they know that the answer to almost every question is "it depends on the ratio." One student put it better than we ever have in a lesson plan. He said, "I used to think that you could just kind of throw anything on a compost pile, and it would turn into like soil. But now I really learned that like it's a recipe, and it's like baking a cake."
So we had a real operation, run by ten year olds, and everybody felt good about it. And then our students figured out that composting is, in the words of one, "not the best thing on the food waste hierarchy, but it's also not the worst thing, and that it's actually more of a science than you would think."
She was right. On the food recovery hierarchy, feeding people comes first, then feeding animals, and composting sits near the bottom. The thing we had gotten really good at was the last resort. That is an uncomfortable thing for a fifth grader to grapple with. And it is also exactly the thread we spent the rest of the year pulling.
Devin:
The next question came from the kids, not from us. We had been weighing what came off the trays, and the numbers were all over the place. Some days we had 30 pounds of food waste, some days 60, some days 90. They wanted to know why one day was so different from another.
So they designed a study. The question was whether incentives change how much food gets thrown away. They partnered with a younger class, ran the incentive, and weighed the results week over week.
On pizza Fridays, the waste went down. Everywhere else the data would not hold still, because the menu changed every week and there was nothing consistent to compare. They also discovered, partway through, that they had never defined what counts as waste. Watermelon rinds were going on the scale. So were bread crusts. As one of them explained at the science symposium, "the amount of food waste went down, but we couldn't actually measure accurately because all the foods were different every week except the pizza, so we couldn't exactly measure."
Our results showed that teaching kids about food waste did not necessarily lead to a reduction in food waste.
Both of us:
Our district climate action plan is about the building envelope, energy use, employee commute. Those are important, and they are not things a ten year old can wrap their hands around. Food is. A kid can carry a bucket, run a scale, read a graph, and notice that the graph is lying to them.
What they got was not a reduction in food waste. What they did get was a working picture of a system, and the appetite to keep poking at it. That is the more durable outcome, and honestly it is the harder one to plan for.
If you are thinking about starting something like this, you don’t need the compost palace, the partner organizations, or the stainless steel sorting station. You need one bin, a scale, and the willingness to let students ask the next question even when the answer embarrasses your data. We had good help along the way from Cedar Circle Farm, Willing Hands, the Haven, our solid waste district, and Hypertherm, but all of that came after the kids were already curious.
We will leave the last word to one of our fifth graders, who was asked what advice she would give somebody starting out. "Ask questions," she said. "Ask lots and lots of questions because at first it will not make sense, and if you don't ask questions, it'll probably still not make sense."
For more information, contact Devin Burkhart or Chrissy Morley at Marion Cross School, or the Equitable Climate Action Project at info@uvtpc.com or bit.ly/hopefulstories.
