BLS Youth CAN is working on getting an On-Site Organic Waste Decomposer. This is a self-contained Organic food Disposal System. The BioGreen 360 quickly and easily converts organic waste into a reusable organic b-product with is 10-20% of its original weight. This material can be used in a variety of ways. It can be mixed with traditional compost or used as fertilizers and applied to gardens.

BLS Youth CAN is patterning with Casella Recycling and BioGreen to bring the digester to Boston Latin School.

BLS Youth CAN has been working on a project to get a food digester for our school.  The digester will enable us to convert all food waste into compost.  This is important because food waste in landfills produces methane, one of the worst green house gasses contributing to global climate change.  A school digester will enable us to get ahead of coming regulations in Massachusetts that will prohibit all food waste from landfills by 2014.  BLS Youth CAN has been working to implement a 3-month demonstration project involving a leased digester at Boston Latin School.  We began by holding a fair trade fundraiser through Equal Exchange to raise funds to pay for the digester’s leasing.  We raised $2,500.00 in November.  We also began meetings with Paul Hardiman from Casella Waste Management, the organization that has been helping with the Zero Sort Recycling Demonstration program that we have here at BLS. 

Our ongoing meetings with Paul Hardiman and Scott Chase at Casella now include plans to further streamline our zero-sort program with new bins and signs to make it easier for students to comply without too much thinking.  We’re finishing the video about the single stream program at BLS and at Edward Everett and we're planning to feature Casella. We're actually going to be asking the City to allow Casella to handle all of our waste for a trial period so that we can get some solid data about the reductions and cost savings.  One cool thing is that BLS students actually won Round I of the Lexus Eco Challenge with the Recycling Program this past fall.  

As you may know, originally Youth CAN’s plan is to lease a digester.  We’ve gotten all the necessary approvals from our administration, BPS Food Services’ Staff and BPS Facilities. Our original plan was to locate it in our dining hall. We wanted to put where the entire student body would be able to see it.  We discovered that the digester would need to be housed outside.  The plan now is to push back the leasing part of the project until we have the necessary funds and permissions to build a permanent outdoor shed to house the digester.  In the interim, we promoted a zero-food waste trial.  The trial took place on 2/14 and 2/15 as part of our Annual Teach in on Sustainability and Global Climate Change Solutions. That day Youth CAN students launched the zero food waste campaign in the BLS lunches. This gave us an opportunity to weigh trash with the food waste in it on Monday, and then see how much removing the food waste reduced our trash.  It also gave us a chance to document the volume of our food waste in advance of getting an onsite digester for BLS.  During the trial period, all food waste was collected by Casella Recycling and taken offsite to be composted. We'll also did a trial of compostable trays for the two days.  Youth CAN used money from our Fair Trade Fundraiser to purchase the compostable trays from Eco-Orchards. We partnered with EOMS to have the trays removed to a composting site. Check out some of the posters students made to promote the initiative below. We offered showing daily screenings of the Movie "Trashed" in 025 to support the project.