School composting workshop

As a key part of our zero waste school project, we have designed a plan to start composting the food remnants from both the canteen and our students' snacks. Although the amount of organic matter collected from the bins in the common areas is not very big, a large number of people have lunch in the cafeteria twice a week and a considerable amount of organic waste is produced there.

To introduce the topic to our students, we have watched some videos about how important composting oganic matter is, what we can compost, how composting happens, the best conditions for our compost pile or bin, what we must do step by step... 

These are some of the materials we have used:

 

- CEIDA, resources for the classroom: El compostaje casero. (Spanish language)

- Composting at School, by US Composting Council. (With a very useful troubleshooting section)

- A Kids' Guide to Composting.

We have talked about all this, we have turned two old rubbish bins into compost buckets, carried out several composting workshops, organised the groups that will take care of our compost bins and control the process, and talked to the canteen staff to ask for their collaboration. 
This is a summary of one of our composting workshops with 1 ESO students:

Waste Bin Analysis 1

Before we start customizing and thinking about the best locations for our waste bins, we must analyse the different types if waste we produce and the amount of waste of the different fractions. So this is our next step and we are doing it next Monday. Some students have volunteered to classify the waste we find in the bins in the different areas, weigh it, and fill in a form to find the proportions in the maths lessons later.

Our material is ready...