The goal of our workshop is to provide creative solutions and resources to assist schools in reducing waste and improving recycling programs.

Instead of starting with what bin does this go in, we should first be asking does this item need to become waste at all?

The analysis found that 93% of commercial, industrial and institutional waste is technically recoverable through existing or expanded programs and infrastructure.

The goal is not simply to move material from trash to organics. The goal is to ask in order, could this waste have been prevented? Could the food still serve its intended purpose? and only then what is the best way to manage what remains.

The law will not immediately eliminate school recycling costs or solve every packaging problem, but it does begin to shift more responsibility upstream to the companies that design and sell packaging.

Purchasing is where sustainability moves from an optional activity to the normal way a school operates.

Our goal is to divert 90% of what we produce on campus from entering a landfill or an incinerator. ... It's an ambitious goal. I don't think any institution's reached it. We want to be the first.

Even though reuse when it comes to waste management is really high on the hierarchy it's huge in terms of amount reduce sent to the landfill... it's also really hard to get data on. So that's why having a platform like this is really helpful.

In order for reuse to work, it has to be convenient and economically efficient. And that is how we'll get to much more reuse if possible.

For teachers, it guarantees that students are receiving all of the exact same supplies and that teachers are receiving um exactly what they want.

One thing we've learned is crayons are very hard to sort and sharpen. So, we do our best... but we have kind of learned along the way to to be done with those or to pass those along to someone else if needed.

At the beginning of this we collected glue sticks from the entire school and brought them all in and we have not p purchased glue sticks for two years.

You don't have to be that overachiever. You can just do level one or level two... It was really important that we um get administrative support which we had um immediately.

Every time we buy something new we have to keep in mind that the full life of the product um exists not just the disposal part which I think we tend to focus on is where does this go recycle compost trash reuse.

Reducing kind of more steps. And then of course we have waste prevention which eliminates all of the steps because we never needed the product to be created in the first place.

I think we want to shift a little bit from thinking about how can I get rid of waste to how can I prevent waste from being generated.

We like to say that really anything that was once living can be composted. So your fruits, vegetables, plants, wood leaves, but we also like to say kind of like in in commercial composting even things like hair and bones um will break down in in composting.

BPI is currently the only acceptable third-party certifier that's allowed by state law in Minnesota... if they are not currently BPI certified, nobody else is actually passing the regulations of the law.

All of these are really just design it's a great marketing ploy to make you think you're doing something that's better, but the reality is you're probably just buying trash.

I could probably open a store with the amount of silverware that I get from schools. U knives, forks, uh not a lot of knives, forks and spoons, though. I mean, thousands a year we we pull out from school lunchrooms.

If you stack all of those together, they are not designed to break down when they're stacked together.