Newtown Public Schools elementary students are making waves with the district's new comprehensive recycling and composting program.

The program teaches students how to properly recycle and compost food and drinks. Each of elementary school's cafeterias have recycling stations, where several bins are lined up with different labels for trash, compost, liquids, and recyclables.

The district picked Sandy Hook Elementary to pilot the program in fall of 2024 and incorporated it into the other three elementary schools midway through the 2024-25 school year, with the expectation of eventually taking it district wide.

Facilities Director John Barlow, who helped kickstart the program with Grants Specialist Judit DeStefano, said the impact of food scrap recycling has been "immense."

Before the recycling of food scraps, Barlow said the average trash dumpster going out of SHS roughly weighed 325 pounds. In the first two months, that number was cut down to 211 pounds — about a 28 pounds per cubic yard reduction.

Barlow said this also equates to around 13,440 pounds — or 7 tons of food scraps — removed from the trash stream over 180 days at one school building.

The program also reduced the school's dumpster pick-ups from 5 times a week to 3 times a week, with Public Works coming to pick up compost twice a week. Barlow said this equates to savings, as people are charged on weight and how many times haulers come to the facility.

Due to reductions from the food scraps recycling program, Barlow said the district received a roughly $25,000 reduction in its contract with trash hauler All American contract for next year.

By May 1, the four elementary schools’ waste was reduced by 21,096 pounds in food scraps and recycling, and 320 total cubic yards.

“This is huge,” Barlow said. “The representative from [All American] came to my office and said, ‘What are you people doing?’ and I just said, ‘We’re seeing big numbers going down here.’”

Starting Early

Starting the program at the elementary schools, DeStefano said, “just made sense” from an educational perspective. DeStefano explained that students who start recycling at a young age have it become another part of their routine.

“They carry it into the next school and then the next grade, and then by the time they’re older, it just becomes second nature,” DeStefano said.

The original plan for the program was to pilot it at SHS, launch it at the other elementary schools the following year, and then start it at Reed Intermediate School.

However, DeStefano said they realized a flaw with the initial plan around the middle of the year: graduating SHS students would go on to Reed where there would be no composting program right away.

This would have been a regression for those students, so DeStefano said they modified the timeframe and brought the other elementary schools into the fold mid-year.

Starting with one school, she said, let them to track their progress, as well as build the infrastructure and make adjustments to the recycling program. DeStefano described the process as involving a lot of trial and error, but said they learned from those experiences and bettered the program.

The grant was also used to develop a Green Team at SHS, an after-school club that DeStefano acts as "cheerleaders" for the program.

"To make this kind of program work, you really need the kids on board, and that starts with the administration, teachers, and facilitators on board, and that gets the kids excited for it," DeStefano said.

It's that enthusiasm which made the program really successful, according to DeStefano. Even having administrators s in the cafeterias during those first days, she added, made a really big difference.

“There’s that trickle down effect, where there’s that enthusiasm about something, and it's just nice to see” DeStefano said.

Going Green

DeStefano called her job of working with grants the "impetus" for the district’s new program. She heard from First Selectman Jeffrey Capeci about an opportunity for a $5,000 environmental-focused grant from FirstLight Sustains, the grant program of clean power producer FirstLight.

The idea for a comprehensive recycling and composting program is a long time coming for NPS, as the district never had anything like it before, according to DeStefano. While the district was in the early stages of rolling out an enhanced recycling program at one of the schools, she said the idea fell through due to COVID.

"I'm already interested in environmental efforts and whether we could be doing more at the schools, so when Capeci talked to me about the grant, [recycling] was the first thing I thought of," DeStefano explained.

The first thing DeStefano did was loop in Facilities Director John Barlow and Public Works Director Fred Hurley. The three met, talked about what they needed for the program, and submitted a grant application.

She said Barlow and Hurley were the "right people to have conversations with," as the Town had gotten significant grants from the state to build a composting station at Newtown Transfer Station.

"As Public Works developed their compost facility to increase capacity, they didn't have enough scraps at first to use the facility to its fullest potential," DeStefano said. "So the timing just really worked out."

Public Works, interested in getting the most out of their enhanced facilities, offered to haul away food scraps for the program. DeStefano said this was crucial since the biggest part of the development process are the logistics of getting the food scraps from the schools over to the transfer station.

"So the Town helping us really helped get the program going, because there's no cost for the transport to the schools," DeStefano explained.

The education aspect was far from an individual effort, according to DeStefano. She said they got a lot of help from the district's custodial staff and the Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority, the latter of which critically advised them from the beginning and helped them develop a flexible budget and timeline.

“We decided that we wanted to start small and build capacity,” DeStefano said. “We knew early on that we’d really need to focus on data collection to be able to justify and say [the program] is at least going to be cost neutral.”

Around The World And Back Again

One thing that makes Newtown residents very fortunate, Barlow said, is the composting station is at Newtown Transfer Station.

Newtown Transfer Station originally applied for a permit that allowed for 7 tons of food scraps to be brought down and composted there.

However, thanks to the success of the program, the transfer station routinely received over 10 tons of food scraps by the end of the year. To that end, Barlow said Public Works was looking to expand the facility and buy a screener.

According to Town Engineer John Curtis, the screener can analyze the piles of compost the facility has made that they can't turn into compost because of contamination or has any material that's too large.

A hurdle for Newtown, Barlow said, is that the composting center has to be 100 percent contamination free.

Where other places such as New Milford Farms will accept a certain amount of contamination with the compost, Barlow said there is a cost to improve their compost with a carrier.

After sorting through the food scraps that go to its facility, Newtown Transfer Station staff will send Barlow information as to what schools need the most assistance with contamination.

According to Curtis, the compost is generally a 3-1 ratio — for every yard of food waste, they try to combine three yards of leaves and wood chips with it. They then make an aerated pile with it, which has perforated pipes the pile sits on.

These pipes provide a continuous source of air that helps feed the process. The intent, Curtis said, is for it to be a little less labor intensive since it's always getting oxygen.

The process lasts anywhere from six weeks to two months. In the meantime, food waste still comes in from the schools and from the Town, so Curtis said they'll mix the pile and bury it.

He called it a "biofilter," an established method for controlling odorous and volatile organic compound air emissions from composting operations. He also said the transfer station adds material on top so they don't leave food waste or composted material sitting out in the open.

"And then with the screener, we'll start running it through and we will have compost that we can then give out to residents," Curtis said. "That's the goal."

The screener would most likely cut down the composting process to a day, but Curtis said it could take a little longer depending on how well the screener is working.

"It's a new process," Curtis said. "We're all learning, but hopefully we'll have some good compost in the future that everyone can enjoy."

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.