Worm Bins in the Classroom by Alyson Winkelaar

Here in the Community Relations section (of Waste Management Services), we are gearing up for another school year. With presentations such as Waste and Our World, Choose to Reuse, Squirmy Wormy Composting, and Garbage In-CompostOut, we reached over 3000 students and teachers during the 2011/2012 year.

Squirmy Wormy Composting presentations

With these presentations, we brought the wonderful world of worm composting to nearly 100 classrooms last year, alone.  During the presentation, students are taught how red-wiggler worms can help us with the fundamentals of waste management: the 3 Rs. Much of the food waste that comes from our kitchens and lunches can be Reused as a food source for our red-wiggler worms, helping us Reduce the amount of waste we throw away every day. By munching and digesting, the worms Recycle our food waste into high quality compost that can be added to our potted plants and garden beds. The students are taught how to care for the worms. They learn that worms will thrive with the right balance of moisture, air, food, and shelter.
Most times, we leave a small worm bin behind. It is stocked with worms and bedding material so the students can enjoy the benefits of compositing, right in their classroom.

How We Can Improve

One thing we want to improve is support for the worm bins that we leave behind. Every once in a while, we get a panicked call for help from a teacher whose worm bin has turned into a smelly bog, the worms are desperately clinging to the sides or trying to climb out, and food is sloshing around the bottom. Of course, that's if any worms can be found at all! We worry that, when things go wrong, teachers will just throw out their worm bin...  rather than ask for help. We want to support teachers, so they have a good experience with worm composting. 

How MCRs Can Get Involved

We are looking for volunteers to help with our School Worm Team.  Lots of Master Composters Recyclers have agreed to be a Compost Doctor (making house calls to assess someone's backyard compost bin). The School Worm Team is Compost Doctoring at its finest!  Volunteers will be matched with schools in their area that have recently had a Squirmy Wormy Compost presentation.  MCRs will contact the teacher two or three weeks after the presentation to see how things are going with their worm bin.  If help is needed, either advice over the phone or a quick visit with the teacher will help put their worm bin back on track. 

This new grassroots School Worm Team initiative is important because it is neighbours helping neighbours. We would love to revisit schools and see thriving worm compost bins in the classrooms that are actually being used to help reduce the amount of waste being thrown out at schools throughout Edmonton. This is a super simple way to volunteer and get to know your local schools at the same time!

Sign up for the School Worm Team at myVolunteerpage.com. 

Alyson is a Program Specialist and has worked for the City of Edmonton (Waste Management Services) since fall, 2011. She already delivered 3 presentations for the school year and is excited to do many more. Alyson became a Master Composter Recycler in 2012. Outside of the world of waste, she is an accomplished dog trainer.

Back to School Not So Basics by MCR Christine Werk

Writing supplies at the Reuse Centre

It is time to drag our children off of the playgrounds and send them back to school. While going back to school “in style” is important, so is staying green at school. One easy green option is reusing old school supplies and/or purchasing a portion of school supplies from the Reuse Centre. The Reuse Centre has a wide selection of binders and pencil cases and an impressive range of crafting supplies that can be used throughout the school year. While researching for this blog, I ran into a teacher who informed me that it may be very difficult to get children to shop for second-hand supplies. Fair enough. May I suggest turning back-to-school into two lessons: budgeting and the environment?

Michael Recycle exploring the Reuse Centre

Step 1: Figure out what the cheapest most boring selection of school supplies would cost. Share this information with the child.

Step 2: Have the child look through the home to see if they have some of the supplies already.

Step 3: Go to the reuse centre and fill in any additional supplies that are available there. Try not to get distracted by all of the trophies.

Step 4: Finally, let your child use the money they saved for upgrading the remaining school options from the boring ones to the cool ones. Perhaps this means that by finding good binders at the Reuse Centre, he/she gets the Spiderman backpack instead of the generic blue one. Little Samuel or Felicia may even be able to pick up some stickers to refurbish their binders.

When getting ready for back-to-school, consider trying this out. There are lots of ways we can teach our children to keep the environment healthy while they learn about the world and how to be a part of it.

Binders, notebooks, and pencil cases at the Reuse Centre

                                                                                                

                                   

Public Art Rollin' into Back Alleys Near You

Waste Management Services is constructing a new building called Kennendale Waste Operations East to house single-family collection vehicles and staff. This means that thanks to The City's Percent for Art Policy there will be some colourful collection trucks in our fleet of vehicles. The policy states that 1% of the capital budget for new buildings will be dedicated to public art work.

Waste Management Services' new operations building at the Northeast Kennendale public art project includes 2 components:

• 6 newly wrapped trucks will be introduced to the streets of Edmonton over the next few months.
• 6 permanent panels will be installed on the new building. 

The first of 6 trucks which are wrapped with art selected by the Edmonton Art Council.  

The Edmonton Arts Council has selected three Alberta artists for the initiative:

Karen Campos was born in El Salvador and currently resides in Edmonton, where she attended MacEwan University as an Illustration Major in Design Studies. She has exhibited works at the ARTery, Exposure Festival, and was one of three artists who participated in the downtown Colour Alley Project.

Jeff Chan currently lives in Lethbridge, and is completing an Education Program at the University of Lethbridge. He received his bachelor of fine arts in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2011. He has participated in art shows in both Calgary and Lethbridge; recently he completed a performance piece entitled “Free Wishes” in San Francisco.

David Goulden received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of British Columbia and then went on to complete his Masters of Architecture from the University of Calgary. David’s artistic career has spanned the last 12 years. He is an artist, creative director, art director, and a designer. His work has been published and shown internationally including Canadian Architect, AZURE, and Applied Arts magazines. He is the founder of id8 design group. David currently lives in Calgary.

Garbage and art often find themselves hand in hand. Here are some other Edmonton based projects you may find interesting:

City Hall, Edmonton Police Service, Alberta Health, Catholic Social Services, Homeward Trust and Arts on the Ave came together as The 82 Street Team to create The Eyes on the Alley Project. Photos were placed on dumpsters on alley east of 82 Street between 121 and 122 Ave. 

Edmonton on the Edge has wrapped seven dumpsters in the Alley of Light. To check them out, stroll in the alley just north of Jasper between Enterprise Square (103 St) and Beaver HIlls Park (105 St). Photographs were all created by painting with light. 

Brandon Blommaert's work was selected for the Ambleside Ecostation in 2009. The artwork consists of five images of typical Alberta landscapes: the Rocky Mountains, Boreal Forest, Parkland, the Badlands and urban sprawl.

Soft autonomous earthworm robot at MIT

But what will happen when they escape into natural areas?

A Walk in the Park by Kit Nash

I am lucky enough to live near one of Edmonton’s amazing community gardens. The Peace Garden Park is located on 120^th Street and 103^rd Avenue in Oliver. It is an oasis of green in a neighbourhood of high-density living.

I wandered over to talk to some gardeners about the garden and about the compost facilities. As you can see from the picture, the compost bin is near overflowing. It’s great that it’s getting used, but some gardeners, like Clayton and his dog Yakul, don’t know much about it.

Getting information out to gardeners is one of the challenges of any community project. Here, however, there are other challenges. Any compost bin needs to balance the greens with some browns. One of the gardeners, Sandra Anderson (and her dog, Susie) said that this compost bin was mostly greens due to all the weeding. So the compost does smell a little. Also, the water supply at the garden is intermittent. Unfortunately, the pump is currently broken. Gardeners make other arrangements to keep the compost at optimum moisture.

Overall though, the garden looks great, and it’s wonderful to see composting at Peace Garden Park. Compost happens! And the garden loves it!

If you helped with composting at a community garden, how did you solve challenges? What helps to communicate with gardeners?

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Kit Nash graduated from the Master Composter Recycler Program in 2011.