Cash for Cans

Green Council Meeting Minutes

Thursday, September 27, 2007

UpperSchool (rm 115)

Attendance: Tom Kimmerer (with sons Will and Greg), Jarah Jones, Wendy Cegelski, Bill Barnes, Deb Melear, Colleen Crawford (stopped in briefly) and Debbie Wheeler

• Cash for Cans Contest

Updates from the Lower and Middle School indicate it is questionable whether or not they will participate. Jarah and Colleen will continue to talk about it with Paul and Heidi.

• Composting in the Buttery

We are going to participate as a pilot school in the city's food composting program. The city will deliver Lenny's (yard waste containers) for our compost and it will be mixed in with yard waste from the rest of the city.

Our initial plan has been to begin composting in the kitchen (with vegetable kitchen scraps) then expand to the Buttery itself, but after discussing it in our meeting, that may not be feasible. Tom mentioned that it will be difficult to compost only vegetables because of the education and physical separation that would have to occur when kids are bringing their plates to the dish window after their meal. Colleges that have been successful at implementing waste food composting have high temperature composters that are able to handle all food scraps (meat and dairy along with vegetables) and even milk cartons and biodegradable carry-out containers. Unfortunately, we probably don't produce enough food waste to have a high temperature composter and the city does not use high temperature composters. With that in mind, we all decided it would be best to limit our compost to what the kitchen generates and focus students and staff on reducing their food waste rather than trying to compost it.

Bill will measure the amount of vegetable scraps he generates in the Buttery to determine how many containers he will need from the city.

The week of October 22nd, our campus will focus on sustainability. This date is especially appropriate because Wednesday, October 24th is Campus Sustainability Day. As part of this initiative, Bill will measure food waste after every lunch and post how much each division is producing each day. Campus-wide we will need to educate our students and faculty on reducing food waste. We will also encourage folks to bring in their own water bottles and cups as well as their own cloth napkins. Bill even recommended we ask students to only get one disposable water bottle at lunch and refill it if they are thirsty for more (it is NOT recommended that students continue to use this disposable container, however, since these plastics are not designed for repeated uses). We would also discourage folks on campus from using carry-out containers. In fact, we also discussed the possibility of phasing out to go containers permanently. This may be a discussion we should return to later.

To help with Campus Sustainability Week, students at each division should make signs and teachers need to discuss it in class to be successful.

• Maintenance Staff involved in Composting?

As part of our composting, we also discussed the possibility of asking the maintenance staff to compost all their yard waste from campus. If we can ask Steve (or Luann) how much waste they generate in a week, we can request Lenny's from the city to handle yard waste from our campus.

• Less Greenery?

We also discussed concerns about the growing number of 'rock' areas particularly around the LowerSchool and the reduction of green. Many areas of grass have been replaced with rocks and several bushes and trees have been removed. We never really came to a decision about what to do with this issue, although Wendy did suggest that we consider sending someone on the maintenance staff to an educational program on green landscaping. Tom suggested that someone from UK's new sustainable ag program might be able to help.

• Green Savings

Tom brought up that many 'green' programs request that the administration return a percentage of the money saved due to green projects to the green program. This can help fund future green initiatives. This is also an issue we should return to at our next meeting.

• Next Meeting and Student Participation

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, October 12th at 3:30 in Debbie's room (two weeks from today). We would like to invite students (at least a few from every division) to attend. Tom's son, Will, and Merrick, Deb's daughter, would like to be a part of our council and have been invited to attend.