January 11th 2011
Students at Ventura’s Montalvo School tally lunch waste
Photo by Rob Varela, Rob Varela / Star staff // Buy this photo
Montalvo School third-grader Gabriel Bacon places plastic-foam trays back in a trash can on Wednesday. The Montalvo School Gifted and Talented Education students participated in a “waste audit” as part of their efforts to set up a campus recycling program.
With a long-standing state mandate to reduce trash sent to landfills, a team of city, county, school district and waste industry employees joined students at Montalvo School in Ventura on Wednesday to help reduce trash generated during lunch.
Gifted and Talented Education students in the third, fourth and fifth grades participated in a “waste audit,” sorting through and assessing the lunch trash, as part of an effort to get a recycling program up and running at the school.
“Our project is a student-driven trash assessment so students can understand the flow of trash around the campus and hopefully make better decisions about throwing things away,” teacher Teresa Ellingson said.
Sandy Curwood, director of food and nutrition services for the Ventura Unified School District, said she was relieved to have so many representatives from the city, county and district in one place where they could all discuss solutions to the mountains of waste produced by schools each day.
“One of the challenges is to get all of the agencies to cooperate with coming up with solutions for what we can do with the trash,” Curwood said.
Lynn Harrison, general manager of Harrison Industries, which collects much of the trash in Ventura County, was on hand to show students and school officials what was recyclable. “We brought literature and fliers and we’re helping to kick off what will be an audit of all the schools,” Harrison said.
The team was led by Christine Wied, environmental services specialist for the city of Ventura. Wied said a group from the city will be going school to school, assessing where waste can be recycled and trying to come up with easy ways to do that.
The Montalvo students sorted lunch waste on a large tarp laid out by Jill Sarick, an educator with the county Environmental Services Division. The waste was sorted into recyclable, waste and compost piles.
Ian Ruiz, 11, a fifth-grader, said it is important to figure out what to do with trash “because it gets blown into the ocean and eaten by animals and it piles up.”
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Tags: Montalvo School, School
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