Town residents during Monday’s Board of Education meeting called on the public schools to pursue more sustainable ways of serving food and discarding food waste.
Margot Bright Thorsheim, a board member and secretary of Planet New Canaan, said that the district ranks among the best in the nation “primarily due to our financial resources, and the vision of the people on this Board and in our administration and its faculty.”
“However, many believe that one educational component is missing in this town, and I would also like to advocate for greener schools in the New Canaan district,” Bright Thorsheim told members of the Board of Ed during their regular meeting, held in the Wagner Room at New Canaan High School.
“We have yet to show our youth some basic principles of caring for their home and the planet that their children will inherit,” she continued. “Even while we as parents teach our kids to be environmentally respectful, they are going to school and learning that we live in a disposable economy where convenience rules the day, regardless of the long-term cost. And even though we know what is wrong, we have used disposable cafeteria supplies for decades and throw away all of our food waste. We try to make ourselves feel better because some items have been converted to compostables. However, the extra cost for those supplies is wasted because there is no composting. And all those supplies are being incinerated anyway at significant cost to the taxpayers.”
Bright Thorsheim called for the district to consider “reusable institutional kitchens,” saying “it’s time to work together to find ways to implement reusable supplies and composting in our schools.”
“This is education that will benefit every single student and the world in which they live,” she said. “Numerous districts have done this in Connecticut and around the country with significantly less resources. Planet New Canaan as well as other nonprofits in our town would like to partner with the Board to help make this a reality.”
She spoke during a public comments section at the top of the Board of Ed meeting. The school board has a longstanding policy of not addressing such comments during the meeting itself.
Three New Canaan teens—NCHS students Abby Dymond and Kate Kupchak, and St. Luke’s School student Georgi Owsley—also addressed the Board of Ed, and named specific programs that the district might consider.
The high school’s “lack of effective recycling” is “one of the biggest issues” for students, Dymond said.
“And one of the best solutions to this is redeemable recycling,” she said. “And it’s more valuable because it keeps cans and bottles in the food-safe recycling stream, which is more usable and more valuable, as opposed to units going to single stream recycling, where they’re less likely to be actually recycled. And actually, in January of 2024, the CT bottle deposit increased from 5 cents a unit to 10 cents a unit, which increases the potential revenue that NCPS could bring back.”
One solution that’s been effective elsewhere is ‘iRecycle,” Kupchak said. It “offers a partnership program where they provide bags and arrange for regular pickups.”
“They also cut a check back to the school besides their take,” she said. “And the Planet New Canaan Youth Board has already met with them to discuss a potential partnership along with the clubs at our high school.”
Owsley, a junior at St. Luke’s, said she introduced iRecycle there in the fall “and so far we’ve already made $100 off of the redeemables and working with iRecycle, so clearly it’s very valuable to the school.”
In Weston, $12,000 was collected last year in redeemable fees, Kupchak said.
“With the new 10 cents a can rate, this revenue should even double,” she said. “And they use student teams and clubs to oversee the program, and the fees collected go back to these teams and clubs or the school. And I already know as a club president of one of the clubs at our high school, we have lots of students who would be willing to get involved with this solution, because we see how much plastic pollution there is in our cafeteria every day.”
John Kriz, a New Canaan resident, called for Board Chair Hugo Alves to create a committee that would include BOE members as well as people in the community to perform a cost-benefit analysis of switching from disposable to reusable cafeteria items, recycling and composting.
“Our school’s cafeterias rely on many disposable utensils, all of which, including uneaten food, goes into the trash and eventually landfills,” Kriz said. “The EPA tells us that food waste comprises around a quarter of municipal solid waste and over half of methane emissions, which is a greenhouse gas.”
Another speaker, New Canaan’s Grace Duffield, said she was “shocked” to learn that the public schools in town with solar panels on their roofs also “suspended the use of dishwashers, resulting in an unnecessary number of truckloads of trash darted to landfills.”
“So this isn’t good for the environment and it’s also terrible role modeling for the students,” said Duffield, known to many as a former reporter for the New Canaan Advertiser, a professionally reported print newspaper. “There are probably budget implications. Even though the schools may be saving money, the town must be getting slammed with the transfer fees. Because I know when I was last reporting on it, every year, the transfer fees were going up a substantial percentage. Lastly, I want to remind you that the Board of Ed goals Include being good stewards for town resources. And I would argue that this is really in contradiction to that goal.”
So proud of all the speakers that this extremely important issue was finally addressed
Hear hear! Students want to be green. Thanks to all for speaking at this BOE meeting. If other towns can do it, we can. Let’s make a thoughtful start as suggested.
Just as important, if not way more so, is WHAT our children are eating. Eat Real Certified is a wonderful program for NCPS’s to seriously consider.
If we can’t get rid of bottled water, all these solutions are just kicking the can down the road. Paper cups and water from the big 5 gallon dispensers for starters.
These students did their due diligence and did a great job advocating for the changes they want to see in their schools. I hope NCPS and the BOE works with them to help implement these initiatives.