The Dish: Baltimore City schools have started composting. Can they keep it going?

An elementary school student approached the bins carrying a tray full of food, his eyes wide, looking upward amidst a jostling line of children. The child reached a hand holding a chewed-up apple into the trash can.

“Hold on,” educational associate Scott Hartman said over the din of the lunchroom at Hamilton Elementary/Middle School. He surveyed the boy’s tray, lifting off little baggies holding uneaten celery sticks and placing them into a trash can: plastic, plastic, plastic. All that remained on the tray was a few slices of bread and vegetables. “Everything else goes in here,” Hartman said, gesturing toward a brand new composting bin.

It was a two-second interaction Hartman and educators across Baltimore would repeat over and over last week as 12 public city schools took part in a new pilot program to introduce composting in cafeterias. The initiative is a partnership with Baltimore’s Department of Public Works as officials look to divert waste from landfills and the incinerator.

And it’s particularly pertinent in Baltimore’s school cafeterias, where any student can receive a free lunch. Federal requirements that everyone take a healthy fruit or a vegetable sometimes mean that kids take food they don’t plan to eat, said Anne Rosenthal, farm to school specialist for Baltimore City Public Schools.

The program is already having an impact. Hartman, an educational associate at Hamilton Elementary/Middle School, one of the schools participating in the pilot, said in the days since the composting program started, waste from lunch has decreased 75% — from 24 cans of trash per day down to six. His school has also taken other steps to reduce waste, like pouring out the contents of milk cartons into a bucket so they don’t end up in the landfill, and placing uneaten fruit and other items in a share cart for students to snack on.

But to Rosenthal, the most important aspect of the composting program isn’t actually about reducing waste; it’s about changing mindsets. “We talk to students about being green and about being sustainable, but we don’t always give them the tools” to do so, she said.

The program is funded for only one school year, said Cara Murray, program analyst for public works. It will be up to schools to raise the money if they want to keep it going beyond that — an amount Rosenthal said would be anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 per school per year. That figure includes the cost of bins and twice-weekly pickups from a composting facility.

While Murray said there’s “definitely a desire” to expand composting in schools, “we don’t have funding to offer it longer.” At the same time, she said, it’s standard industry knowledge that composting saves money on waste-hauling costs. Rosenthal hopes that eventually, the reduced cost of trash pickup helps encourage school districts to foot the bill for composting.

Right now, DPW contracts with Veteran Compost, based in Aberdeen, to pick up compost from city schools. The group, which also offers residential food scrap collection in the area, then sells the stuff to gardeners and farmers. “A lot of it comes back to the city,” said owner Justin Garrity.

Garrity, who already has contracts with Harford and Baltimore County schools to pick up their food scraps, said schools are some of the toughest clients to work with in terms of compost contamination since “there’s just so much packaging in a school lunch.” Even with educators like Hartman watching over, it’s inevitable that a few pieces of plastic will fall through the cracks.

But it’s worth it, Garrity said. As landfills in Maryland fill up to capacity, “trash is getting more and more expensive.” Many of his customers find that composting ultimately saves them money. He hopes that the success of the pilot program will “make it a no-brainer to keep it going.”

When it comes to composting, the hardest part may be getting started. Changing behaviors at the trash can isn’t an overnight matter. Many of the schools selected for the pilot have their own version of Hartman — environmentally conscious staffers and students who can help guide kids and grownups through the sometimes exhausting work of sorting lunch leftovers. And they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Literally.

In the cafeteria of Baltimore Design School, science teacher Cassidy Johnson reached a tattooed arm into the compost bin to retrieve a Ziplock bag a high schooler had mistakenly dropped inside. “I know, we’re learnin’,” she said.

Rosenthal said more schools were interested in the composting program than there were resources to make it happen. In selecting the schools to participate, leaders went with places that had a built-in support network of teachers and students willing to take the extra steps to help make it work on a day-to-day basis.

Johnson advocated along with her students to bring composting to the charter school where she teaches AP environmental science. In that class, Johnson’s students learn about some of the problems that happen when landfills start to overflow and pollute the surrounding environment. Composting in the lunchroom is a hands-on way for students to feel like they’re part of the solution. “I think it was really neat for them to see the connection,” she said.

Johnson and others hope to see the composting program continue, and even expand to other schools in Baltimore. “Oftentimes, programs get started and slowly fade away,” she said. But it’s important for students to see that initiatives like this can last beyond just one school year.

Twelfth graders E’gypt King and Narcia Jackson said they’d been talking with Johnson about ways to bring composting to their school since their freshman-year biology class. King said she grew angry and uncomfortable seeing how much stuff her peers threw away at the lunch table. “All that food could be going somewhere,” King said.

They were proud to see their advocacy pay off for their final year in high school. “It’s never too late,” Jackson said. “It’s now here, and that’s all that matters.”