R.I. school composting law has no teeth. These students stopped gritting theirs and took action.

A vermiculture compost bin used to teach schoolkids about composting with red wriggler worms. (Photo by Bella Quiroa)

We see natural disasters and human-led ones on the news and witness how world hunger and a lack of clean drinking water plague and decimate communities worldwide. But we are only high school students, and it feels impossible to do anything about problems being exacerbated by climate change. Adults tell us it is up to us to save the world, but then we look at extraordinary young people like Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate. Seeing the passion and drive of these activists should be enough to push young people around the globe to make a difference in their communities. Their examples help push adults to become more involved in the search for solutions as well. 

It’s a search that has led us right to our schools’ lunchrooms.

Rhode Island enacted a law in September 2021 requiring most schools to compost food waste from their cafeteria and to donate any unserved, non-perishable, or otherwise unspoiled food to local food pantries. The law applies to schools that produce 30 or more tons of organic-waste material and are within 15 miles from an authorized composting facility. This law is important because about 70,000 tons of food is buried each year in Rhode Island’s Central Landfill in Johnston. The landfill is set to be at capacity in 2043. On average in Rhode Island  schools, each elementary school will produce 47 pounds of food waste each school year, each middle school 39 pounds, and each high school 15.6 pounds. 

The law directs schools to conduct waste audits and devise a plan to successfully implement a composting program at their school by 2025. Unfortunately, three years have passed with lackluster results. The reason: The state does not provide schools with additional funding to comply with the mandate, and school administrators appear reluctant to comply. 

As active members of our high schools’ environmental communities, we have faced many challenges in trying to get a composting program off the ground at our schools. These challenges are rooted in lack of both resources and support from administrators and students. Consistently, we have been told, “We don’t have the funding for the needed materials” and “Composting isn’t a priority when we are lacking funding in things such as building repairs and clubs” and “We don’t have the staff capacity for a program like this.”

And so on and so on. We have been met with dead ends from teachers and staff unwilling or unable to support a composting program. Even after we started our volunteer composting programs, we struggled with student participation. We saw firsthand that these programs could not be sustainable or even possible without buy-in from both students and school personnel. We hypothesized this was the reality for most Rhode Island schools. 

But rather than focus on excuses, we choose to see the immense potential of passionate students and staff who did support our efforts these past few years. From students who were eager to guide other students in sorting their waste properly, to teachers creating entirely new curriculum to support their school’s composting programs, this passion, big and small, is blossoming at every school.

We curated a plan that would address the very issues we were facing and build off of the passion community members were showcasing. Our Youth Composting Campaign Initiative  identifies our main goal of getting many more schools in Rhode Island to comply with the mandate, to get more awareness, support and resources to this mandate from the Rhode Island Department of Education and the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and to create a more well informed and active community. Our first steps were to understand the inner workings of the mandate and identify why it isn’t working.

But rather than focus on excuses, we choose to see the immense potential of passionate students and staff who did support our efforts these past few years.

From the get-go, we’ve understood that with funding and other concerns, schools prioritize many other things before composting. To gain more insight, we created a survey to collect data from schools. We received 88 responses from teachers, teacher assistants and principals. We discovered only 36.4% of participants knew about the composting mandate while only 33% worked at a school with an active composting program. Of those with composting programs, 31% described it as “somewhat strong,” and an alarming 13.8% described theirs as “not strong at all.” 

Yes, it’s true this mandate offers no resources to help schools start a composting program. But there are many other and accessible ways these schools can comply. So we connected schools to environmental organizations that can support them in launching a composting program. Even then, we understood there was much more work to be done. We needed to build our campaign and show that there is support for these efforts. That’s why we started an online petition calling for Rhode Islanders to demand the follow through needed to see this law enforced. As of this writing, it has received over 1,000 signatures. But we’re only halfway to our goal of 2,000 signatures.

We want to accurately represent the scale of Rhode Islanders who want these issues to be fixed, and to make real change. Our online petition can be found at this link. There is so much further we can go with this initiative, and we hope to see your support along the way.

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