Ninth grader becomes a compost evangelist

CEDAR RAPIDS - New trash cans popped up in the cafeteria at Prairie Point Middle School and Ninth Grade Academy earlier this month.

The garbage bins have signs on them instructing students to deposit their leftover food, but to throw out their packaging elsewhere.

It's all part of Lilly Brown's plan to save the world.

The 15-year-old ninth-grader is trying to get the school to start putting its food waste in compost piles as opposed to sending it to landfills with the rest of the garbage.

“I like helping the Earth and the environment and this is such an easy thing that just about everybody can do to help,” she said.

The problem with sending food waste to landfills is that it produces methane as it decomposes, which can contribute to global warming. Compost piles give off carbon dioxide -  a less severe greenhouse gas than methane - as well as produce fertilizer.

Brown has taken a methodical approach to convincing her school that composting is worth its time. She weighed all the school's garbage after lunchtime every day in the month of December to get an idea of how much trash students produce on an average day. It came out to about six large bags a day for a total of 170 pounds.

Now she's doing the same thing with the new compostable garbage to show what percentage of the school's trash could be disposed of in a more green fashion. So far, it is averaging about 110 pounds a day - about 64 percent.

It's a dirty job, but Brown said she's excited that she's gotten some of her fellow students interested in composting.

“In the beginning, there was a lot of trash going into the food waste bag, but now a lot of them are sorting,” she said.

Unfortunately, the sorted food waste still has nowhere to go and gets put into the Dumpster with the rest of the garbage. Brown has a few ideas on ways to remedy this. She plans to meet with Kirkwood Community College officials next week to set up a possible compost site on its campus. Barring that, the district would need to pay someone to haul the food waste away separately.

While she's working on the project by herself at Prairie, Brown is coordinating with students working on similar efforts at South East Junior High School in Iowa City and West Branch Middle School. The students there, along with Brown, are all members of “Learning Without Limits,” an interschool science club coordinated by retired teacher Hector Ibarra.

Ibarra is a former West Branch teacher who now lives in Orlando, Fla., but uses email to coordinate and advise students. He said the students have been researching the science of compost piles since August and that he's very impressed with Brown's progress.

“She knows what it takes to move forward,” he said.