Trash Trove: 4th-Graders Learn to Turn Garbage into Rich Soil

By SYDNEY SCHWARTZ

MARSHFIELD

At lunch on Tuesday, 10-year-old Sara Coletta sorted through her classmates’ trash, plucking out lettuce, oranges and grapes.

With her classmates’ help she carried the fruits and vegetables outside in buckets, dumped them in a compost pile and covered them with straw.

“The compost makes soil,” Sara said . “We can have less trash because we have to pay by the pound of what we put in the trash can.”

With help from community members, Sara’s fourth grade class at Martinson Elementary School started the compost pile next to their playground on Tuesday.

Dave Macdonald of Summit Landscaping built the compost bin. John Berber, the Education Director at Holly Hill Farm in Cohasset showed the kids how to pack a pile .

“We’re taking the fruits and vegetables that kids didn’t finish from lunch and putting it in a bucket,” said Jonathan Stern, 10, who came up with the name for the project – Be Loyal For Soil. “At recess we took it to the composting bin and dumped it all out and covered it up.”

The students hope the project will help produce good soil for their vegetable garden and save the town money.

For the rest of the year, all fourth and second graders at the school will recycle their food scraps in the compost pile.

Starting next year, the whole school will participate, said fourth grade teacher and organizer Kim Richards. She was able to start the project with a $1,000 grant from Bridgewater State College.

Richards said the project will help students learn about plants, photosynthesis and the food chain. They will also learn to calculate and graph the amount of recycling compared to trash, measure and graph the temperature during composting, and calculate the savings to the town.

Marshfield pays $80 per ton to dispose of trash. The amount may be small, but by reducing what they throw away, the students are providing an example of how the town can reduce spending on rubbish removal.

Debbie Sullivan, the town’s solid-waste recycling and enforcement officer, said she hopes other schools follow Martinson’s example.

And the kids, who will take turns carrying the food to the compost pile, say they really like sorting out the vegetables from the trash – so far.

“It’s a lot of fun because we get to go through it with our hands,” Sara said. “The only thing I didn’t like about it was touching the apple cores that people already ate.”

Sydney Schwartz may be reached at sschwartz@ledger.com.

Originally published by By SYDNEY SCHWARTZ, The Patriot Ledger.

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