Lupin Hill Disposes of Wasteful Habits

The new school year began on a green note for Lupin Hill Elementary. The school partnered with the city of Calabasas to start a program aimed at reducing trash on campus and encouraging recycling.

In just two weeks since school started in September, the program has resulted in cleaner playgrounds, and the number of barrels of trash generated daily by the school has fallen from 10 a day to just one.

"We are amazed at the results," said Bonny Latham Lyon, the school's beautification committee chair. "Our goal is to teach kids to become better citizens by being aware of their carbon footprint on the earth and also take responsibility and recycle as much as they can."

The program, called the Pack In/ Pack Out lunch project, encourages children to bring their lunches in reusable containers, which helps reduce trash at the source, and also provides a place for children to put their food wrappers into, instead of having them litter the playground.

The larger aim is to encourage cleanliness.

"If you're going on a hike, you wouldn't leave trash on the trail," said Carolyn Coradeschi, Lupin Hill's green committee chair. "And if children are in a home where they don't recycle, they will start doing so and the message will pass to parents and other family members."

The seeds for the project were planted last year, when parents and teachers discussed the garbage floating on the playground after lunchtime.

Some of the reasons given for the debris were that students did not have a proper area where they could sit and have lunch, they were too busy playing to dispose of their food wrappers in the trash bin or they were in too much of a hurry to put them in the right containers for recycling.

Last year, parent and teacher representatives met with an environmentalist with the city of Calabasas and learned that 75 percent of the trash the school was generating could be recycled.

"Our goal was to reduce trash by 50 percent, and we've met that," Lyon said. "This is fiscally sound for us because we now have to pay less to the waste management department for our trash."

As with all new projects, this too has met with challenges.

"Most people are enthusiastic about it, not everybody," said Coradeschi. "Sometimes kids say putting the trash into their lunchboxes is messy, and they don't want to take it home."

Then there are questions about how to deal with hot lunches or messier food items such as yogurt or applesauce. Those are the gray areas, which Lyon and Coradeschi's team have yet to clarify.

"For now we are trying to focus on the educational, environmental and fiscal aspect of this project," said Lyon.

Over the last school year the beautification and green committees have made several changes to make the Pack in/ Pack Out lunch project work smoothly.

The muddy playground has been replaced with a synthetic turf. This move saves water and also allows for an area outside the classroom where children can gather and bring their lunchboxes so that they can put their trash right back into them.

The committees also added more trashcans on campus, made sure they were well-marked, and placed pictures of cans and bottles on the designated receptacles to create a visual cue so students would know exactly where to dump their trash.

"We have had amazing results due to parent/teacher leadership and wonderful students," said Principal Sheila Grady.

The team now plans to expand the idea of recycling by inviting speakers to talk about water conservation, waste management and other green issues. The to-do list also includes composting, and the best ways to dispose of food left over from hot lunches.

"Our intention is really for the kids to own this project so that they can pass it on to the next grade and the grade after that," said Coradeschi. "We want it to be something that the kids truly take pride in."