Slowly but surely Tahoma High School is embracing green practices that are good for both the environment and the school district’s bottom line.

It started two years ago, science teacher Clare Nance said, when classroom recycling was rolled out in an initiative pushed by the school’s environmental club known as the Green Team.

From there, Nance said, lunchroom recycling kicked off last year.

“That big elephant in the room (was there), we’ve got to do food waste,” Nance said. “That was the goal this year. It took me half the year to honestly get up the nerve to tackle it. It’s a hard one because there’s so much less wiggle room because of contaminants.”

Nance, in addition to teaching science and Global Academy, which has an emphasis on sustainability, is an advisor for the Green Team at Tahoma High.

Green Team members worked on that next big challenge, Nance said.

“The big piece is education, so, starting with the recycling program and educating how much garbage we were reducing just by recycling,” Nance said. “We’re trying to educate kids on the amount of garbage that doesn’t need to go to the landfill.”

And as more schools in the district have taken on recycling and composting, more money has been saved because it’s less expensive to compost organic materials while separating out compostable food waste cuts down on the amount of garbage that needs to be hauled away, which also saves money.

“Last year we were able to save $25,000, I think district wide, just in garbage pick up,” Nance said. “The last two years my Global Academy kids have actually visited the Cedar Grove landfill and it’s really impactful.”

With the understanding by her Global Academy students and Green Team members of the difference it would make to further increase the school’s efforts to reduce garbage output, Nance said, they dealt with the logistics.

Composting bins had to be purchased and meetings with custodians were held to talk about how to handle the additional work of emptying those bins without making more work for the custodians, Nance noted.

“Our big focus was to not impact the custodians’ daily work load because it’s already huge,” she said. “We have some students that are TAs (teacher assistants) who go help the custodians empty (the compost bins) right after lunch.”

The effort began a little more than three weeks ago.

Karen Dawson, community outreach director for Maple Valley-based Cedar Grove Composting, explained that she spoke with Nance initially just to see what support the composting company could provide.

“She mentioned that they were going to start doing organics recycling,” Dawson said. “I asked if there was anything we could do on the education front to help with that. So, I came in the day before it started and talked with her Global Academy students, there were about 70 of them, then I met with her Green Team.”

Those kids all had a firm grasp on the basics of recycling and wanted a deeper understanding of what happens after the truck takes away the bags of compostable items. So, Dawson showed them a virtual tour of the facility, how compost is made and how it goes from Cedar Grove Composting to store shelves as bagged compost.

“It was neat for them to learn that it all happens in Maple Valley,” Dawson said. “That’s really neat for the kids to see that there’s a local business that provides jobs that is here for them.”

Nance said that it was not just an effort by the Green Team, but, one that has been widely embraced throughout the school.

Mike Jackson, the DECA advisor who oversees the student store, helped that group bring in compostable cups, lids and straws. In addition, the student store stopped throwing out 22 pizza boxes a day and began composting them, though they’re in the process of adding parchment paper to the boxes so they can be recycled instead.

An espresso stand run by ASB, Nance added, will be bringing in compostable cups, too.

Allowing the students to spread the message to their classmates has been key.

“I’ve educated all of my students,” Nance said. “It’s really more powerful coming from their peers.”

A student produced video was shown by students in every class to introduce this latest effort and Nance also encourages her pupils to talk to their friends at their tables at lunch to spread the message about recycling food waste.

Dawson said it seems to be working.

“In its history, Cedar Grove is most successful in high schools and schools in general when the Green Team advocates,” Dawson said. “The way Tahoma is educating their students is exactly the right way to go.”

Nance knew things were working when they had to make changes to garbage pick up and compost pick up.

“The students, when I go in the lunch room, they’re mostly pretty positive,” Nance said. “We cut our daily lunchroom garbage roughly in half, volume wise, because we’re putting it in recycling and compost.”

Partnering with Tahoma High seems to be working well, Dawson said.

“The best feedback I got was that they needed to schedule an addition (compost) pickup,” Dawson said. “They’ve got a truck two days a week now because the volume was unexpectedly high. The more that’s going in the organics, that’s just more money that they’re saving, and I think that’s exciting.”