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School Composting Workshop

A Primary school in Darlington was a location for an interesting evolution of community compost training within schools. Children attending the school were encouraged to collect compostable material at home for the week running up to the compost workshop. Having bought the material to school the children placed their green waste and compostables into the school compost bin and took part in a short compost workshop.

The power of the sessions lay with each child’s realisation that their little pile of vegetable peelings when added to their classmates suddenly amounted to quite a hefty pile of scraps. Eight classes later and you have a very strong message about little issues becoming big problems.

Session Length: ½ - 1 day

Possible Workshop Content

An optional school assembly, followed by a number of twenty-minute sessions introducing individual classes to home composting. The sessions can be built around pre existing school compost bins or undertaken in individual classrooms.

General Information

A regular programme of school workshops has been undertaken in North Yorkshire and Teesside with the result that well over 1600 school children have now undertaken the training. In future it would be excellent to develop a junior Rotters programme, imagine having hundreds and hundreds of little Rotters everywhere! A final observation regarding school based composting is the necessity to provide caddies in classrooms and staff rooms. When the caddy is full it very quickly becomes somebody’s job to empty it, but if the caddy isn’t there the tea bags and banana skins very quickly find there way back into the rubbish bin.