We are recording this workshop. So, I wanted to say welcome to the 11th annual school recycling workshop. This is our sixth time doing this virtually. Um, for those of you that I haven't had the pleasure of meeting yet, I'm Alli Vanderook. I'm with Dakota County as the school recycling program coordinator. I'm so happy you're here today joining us. Uh and the goal of our workshop today is to provide uh creative resources and solutions to assist schools in reducing waste and improving uh your recycling programs. We kick off VA to reduce packaging waste and cost as well as bulk milk and food service in the cafeteria. And then later we're going to learn about a school district food donation model. Uh some truths about recycling and best practices. and then wrap it up with some school recycling resources. Um, so we're not going to have a breakout session this year for small group discussion, but we're going to use our team's tools um for interaction, questions um in the chat and sharing insights as a large group like we've done um the last several years. Um I encourage you, I know it's a three-hour workshop. I encourage you to stretch your legs when you need to. Um do what you need to stay engaged. um 3 hours is a long time to sit on a on a virtual workshop. So, I appreciate it. Um but for continuing education units, those of us that need those um for this workshop and those have been approved. Um we don't get credit for the breaks. So, I've done my best to try to make it as efficient as possible um and getting kind of those three hours in. Um I've been asked to verify attendance at some point. So, a certain point in the workshop, I'll just take a quick tally of who's in the virtual room and then I'll happily email CU certificates to anyone that needs those following the workshop. So, you'll just reach out to me and I'll talk about that at the end, too. Um, just shoot me an email and request those. So, you can see our agendas here on the screen. You might notice our workshop goes until an odd time of 11:35. Um, that's because intros don't count for CU credits either. Want to make sure that's not an issue for anyone. Um and as I mentioned earlier, we're recording this workshop. Um the recording is going to be available as well as the presentation slides um to request on our web page. So um that'll be up for those who aren't able to make it or if you want to review um content later as well. So uh after each speaker, we're going to take a few questions. Again, if uh there's additional questions we don't have any time for, um each presenter's contact information will be on their last slide. So you can also reach out to them directly to learn more too. So um if possible today um turning our cameras on I know it's kind of interesting trying to feel connected in a virtual space but if it's possible for you today to turn your camera on um that does help us feel more connected I think. Um and as we know our presenters today going to be sharing a lot of great stuff. They put a lot of work into um the information they'll be sharing today. So, just one more way to stay engaged if if you're able to um kind of show that you're present. So, uh my colleague Rachel uh is going to be assisting today with providing our polls. We have a few polls throughout the workshop for engagement and compiling any questions from the chat. So, she's going to just briefly explain some team meeting reminders and tips since this is our first year doing this on Teams. We've been on Zoom the last couple years. >> Hi everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much for being here today. Uh my name is Rachel Kennedy and I work with Ally. Um and I just like to bring some attention to some of the teams features here. So if you look at the screen, um the first one we'll talk about is chat. So if you go up to the top >> when we dropped it in. Oh, I think it's the battery and remote. >> All right. I'm just gonna mute you, Timothy. Um all right, so um first up is the chat. Um, if you go to the top of your screen, you'll see a little chat bubble that says chat. You can click that and you can type a message in there. Um, that will go to everybody in the room. Um, you can raise your hand. So, just a few little slides over there's a little hand up like that that says raise. That's just going to notify us that you have a question um and that you are waiting for someone to call on you. Um, the next one next to it is react. Um, if you feel really good about something, um, you want to give it a little heart, uh, you want to clap, applause, um, feel free to use those reactions. They're super fun. Um, your camera button is going to be all the way to, uh, the right corner of the screen. There's a button that says camera. You can click that to toggle it on and off. And then, um, your microphone is right next to the camera icon. Um, please, uh, start out on mute. Um, you can always raise your hand. we can call on you and then you can unmute yourself to talk. And then um just keeping yourself muted throughout is just going to be helpful to reduce background noise and make sure that other people can hear what the presenter is trying to uh communicate. >> So >> I think that's everything. Thank you. >> Yeah, thanks Rachel. Thanks for walking us through that um and for your help today. Uh so we're going to just quick take a practice poll. Um, so we have a few dialed up in here throughout the workshop. Uh, so I think it's going to show up your on your screen eventually, but um, we just have kind of a fun question to start. Uh, because I know we're all just still waking up this morning. So hopefully you can see that soon. We'll get that pulled up. >> Back to poll is live. So, all right. I see some movement on here. >> Awesome. Yeah. What's our favorite type of vacation? >> Uh, unsurprisingly, camping and hiking for all of us motans. >> Awesome. >> All right. I see Kelly, you have your hand raised. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. My chat just says, "Oops, something went wrong." And I can I can see it says practice poll, but I can't see anything written on it. So, I just wanted to let you know I can't get into the chat for some reason. >> Okay. Sorry about that. Um I'm not sure if that's anything that I'm able to fix on my end. Um or I'm not sure if your teams needs an update. Um but I'll keep taking a look and see if I can do anything for you. That's okay. I just wanted to let you know. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Awesome. So, we got is do we have everything in the chat, Rachel, or in the poll? We're good to >> uh only 10 responses so far, but looks like camping and hiking um is topped out as the favorite. >> Okay, perfect. Well, thanks for our feedback. I don't know when I'm sharing my screen, I cannot see the polls. So, I don't unfortunately get to participate apparently either, but um that's our overall favorite vacay. And again, the polls are just for fun. No worries if if it's not working, you can put your response in the chat, too. Um just any way to stay engaged, I think, is helpful. Um so, we're going to do one more quick poll to get us ready for our first speaker. So, um Rachel's gonna pull up our second poll for us. Thanks for navigating that, Rachel. >> And this one's related to um if people are familiar with the term extended producer responsibility or EPR. And I'm gonna stop sharing here. >> Looks like most folks are not familiar. So that is a great segue into the next presentation. >> Yes, definitely. Awesome. Well, I stopped sharing because I know um our first speaker, Mallerie, um we'll get her screen. Oh, she's already ahead of the game. There we go. Um, so I'm going to introduce Mallalerie here. Uh, Mallerie Anderson. Uh, she is the packaging EPR coordinator uh, with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Mallerie leads implementation of the new packaging waste and cost reduction act which requires producers to fund a statewide program resulting in all packaging being refillable, re reusable, recyclable, and or compostable by 2032. Prior to the agency, uh, Mallerie has worked in solid waste and policy for Henipin County, Minnesota. At the county, she supported the business recycling program, including the food waste requirements. She has a BA in environmental studies from the University of Minnesota, DUTH, and an MS in environmental management and policy from Lond University, Sweden. So fun. So, uh, since most of us are not familiar, it'll be perfect to learn from Mallerie. So, take it away, Mallerie. Thanks for being here. All right. How's my sound? Sounds good. Strong. >> Yep. Perfect. >> Great. Well, thank you, Ally, for having me and uh hello everyone. Um so I there are a lot of really interesting and cool things that will be coming um online in the next four or five years associated with this law. Um and so we thought it was a good opportunity to talk a little bit more about uh how it'll benefit schools. And uh so today I'll talk a little bit about what is the law uh what is the timeline for implementation. It's a very large and complex law. So it will take quite a few years to get it all set up. Um, we also have a compostable products and packaging labeling law which is a separate statute but works very closely with the packaging waste and cost reduction act and then talk a little bit about how it'll benefit schools um and impact schools in the coming years. So what is extended producer responsibility? Um it is a law that extends a producers's financial and managerial responsibility for its products and packaging beyond the manufacturing stage. So both upstream to the product's design downstream to the use of that product including the safe recycling or disposal of that product. So in Minnesota we have several of these laws already established. Um, we have a law around certain electronic devices, uh, particularly those big tube TVs had lead in them. And so, in 2006, there was a law to ban those from going to landfill. And shortly after, a product stewardship law was established to encourage and help support the collection of those. So, manufacturers got a certain number of pounds of electronics they needed to collect each year. um to make sure that those materials are staying out of the landfill. Uh another example of a producer responsibility law is for paint. So here in Minnesota, when you go to the store, you buy some paint, you prepay for the recycling of that paint as part of that purchase. And so if you look at your receipt, there will be a little uh fee associated with the safe management of that paint at the end of its useful life. And so when you're done with that paint, if you had too much, maybe you got a gallon and you had maybe a quarter gallon left and um you're ready to get rid of it, you can bring it to a household hazardous waste facility as a resident um to dispose of it. Uh otherwise, there are a lot of um retail takeback for paint as well. So those are two examples of policies that we have here in Minnesota. Um, this new policy for packaging and paper products is somewhat different. Uh, and I'll talk a little bit about how it's different from those laws that we have already. Uh, but the idea is that manufacturers have the biggest opportunity to impact how products are designed. So, they are choosing what chemicals go into products. They're choosing the design of it. and they have the biggest opportunity to influence how it is safely managed or recycled at the end of its useful useful life. So that's why these policies came about was that manufacturers kind of sell stuff to us and then wash their hands of their products. Um so the idea is to pull them back into the end of life management of these materials and affect the upstream design of those products and materials so that when they come to um us and we have to get rid of them there's a way to do it. Uh so I think this is there's a big conversation around batteries happening right now particularly with those disposable vape pens too. So, it's it's definitely a policy concept that is applied to a lot of different um issues. So, last year, this is a fairly new law. Uh in May of 2024, the governor signed uh the packaging waste and cost reduction act, which is extended producer responsibility for packaging and paper products. And Minnesota was the fifth state to have this law. So preceding us was Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. Uh and since uh in in this year, we've also been joined by Washington, and Maryland who have their own laws. Um and luckily for us, those laws are very similar to ours. So we have a really good cohort of folks to kind of coordinate and collaborate as we implement our programs across the country. So what do we expect to see from this specific law? Uh we expect to see packaging paper products be reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2032. So a big reason for that goal is to make it easier for you and me and children to properly sort packaging and paper products. And at this point, I think a lot of folks find recycling kind of, particularly of plastics, overwhelming and confusing. So, the desire to create more consistent streams of packaging that make it easier for folks to identify what goes where. Another huge cornerstone of this law is that it'll reduce consumers costs of recycling by 90%. So there is something called a covered entity in the law which is residential households, single family all the way up to condos and apartments. A lot of times condos and apartments are treated a little differently for recycling because they're um because of the structure of a lot of the programs. And so this program covers all residential households. It also covers all schools, all child care, all nonprofit, universities, and secondary education. Uh, so it's got a pretty big scope. It also covers public buildings. So, for example, a county, a city building would also benefit from um this law. And so 90% of our recycling costs at full implementation of the law will be covered um as a covered entity. And foundationally this is about the environment. Uh we want to incentivize sustainable packaging. We want to see less trash. We want to see options for refill and reuse um for those folks who want those options. Uh we want to see expanded recycling service and composting service across the entire state. We do a really good job here in Minnesota, but we know in parts of the rural parts of the state, we could do better. And we just want to simplify and standardize recycling even more than we've already done voluntarily over the years. So what materials are covered? We've got packaging, food packaging, and paper products. There are some exemptions associated with the law. Um, for example, paint packaging for paint will be most likely exempt. Um, there are a few steps to that, but it it will be something we'll be working through. Uh, we also have exemptions for certain paper products like newspapers, for example. Uh but generally uh if it's it's used to contain a product or it's a printed paper material um it's within scope of the policy. So how this particular extended producer responsibility law works and a lot of the newer laws uh work is that you have producers paying into a an independent organization called a producer responsibility organization. So that producer responsibility organization says my operating costs are going to be 1.3 million. And so then each producer contributes a proportion of that budget based on how much they sell into a state. So the producers are paying this producer responsibility organization and then that producer responsibility organization is facilitating the program on behalf of its member producers to ensure collection service, recycling service, whatever services are mandated under the law. So in this case uh producer the producer responsibility organization has a lot of responsibilities including education outreach but they also will be having to reimburse uh those recycling costs that I was mentioning earlier. They'll have to be supporting producers in the redesign of their product or their packaging. Um, and so they have a lot of duties that aren't even listed on this page to to help build the program um, and kind of create a more effective recycling system in the state. Uh, another unique aspect of this law is it has a built-in advisory board. Uh so we have a 18 person it's a very large advisory board who give counsel both to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the producer responsibility organization. So they provide recommendations, they review uh program materials and they provide their advice based on their expertise. So it's built up of all the different people who work in the waste industry or are affected by solid waste. um and they have an opportunity to provide input and it creates a a more consistent and um guaranteed I guess feedback loop um for the program. And then as the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, we have oversight and enforcement, making sure producers are complying. We'll be setting goals for the program. um and we'll be completing studies and establishing uh other guidance materials for the program. So the producer responsibility organizations in this program will be reimbursing that collection cost for recycling uh some level of collection cost for organics. They need to cover the transfer. So a lot of times uh materials will go to one facility be consolidated and shipped to another facility. Um they'll have to cover the cost to sort and process that material. So uh you know co-mingled recycling gets then further sorted at a material recovery facility bailed up into individual product or um materials and then sold that way. They'll also have to cover some level of administrative costs for folks who are doing education or have contracts for recycling programs. And then they'll have to invest in refill and reuse systems um alongside the recycling system. The kind of good news, bad news is there will be reimbursement for those programs. uh it'll start at 50% in 2029 and build up to 90% in 3031 and on. So it's a shared cost model. Uh by 2032 all covered materials must be refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable. Uh we'll be developing universal recyclability lists. So when you are at home, your your hauler might send a brochure to you about what can go in the recycling bin and what can't. The idea is to have one universal list for the entire state uh as a bare minimum and make that very well known. Uh so right now we're starting some pretty foundational studies to inform the program and next year once those studies wrap up we will likely initiate a rule making process to establish some of those guidance documents and um guidance materials for the program. And then the stewardship organization will have to draft a stewardship plan which outlines how expense or what the costs of the program will be. Um it'll outline how producers should pay in. It'll outline the uh next steps for the program as as well as the methodologies for certain aspects of the program. I mentioned there's a another law the compost products law. So this law ensures that all food packaging and packaging that is compostable is properly labeled as such. So, I think a lot of us who've been venturing into switching over to compostable packaging notice a lot of random symbols, a lot of verbiage, and it can be really confusing to know which verbiage means what and which which materials are actually compostable and which aren't. So, this law has already gone to into effect and goes it has a second layer of requirements that go into effect next year which will further um uh kind of clarify these materials. And so, we're very excited to see that this labeling of compostable packaging will just further improve over the next couple years. And there are several other states that also have these policies. Um, and they work fairly well with our policy in a way that they're actually more strict. Um, so we do anticipate that this will just um we'll be able to work as a group to ensure that these um products are properly labeled. So the benefits to schools um recycling will be less expensive in coming years. Uh there will be more robust education and outreach. I think probably in Dakota County there's lots of great resources for education and outreach. Um but the idea is to make sure that all communities across the entire state get a lot of opportunities to um and resources for education and outreach. And then by 2032 packaging must be reusable, recyclable or compostable. And again, one of the main intents there is to streamline what we all see and make it easier to sort. So, if you're interested in staying in the loop on study information, um, advisory board meetings and progress and implementation of the law. We do have a website and a email. the email goes about monthly uh associated it's a precursor to the advisory board and then any updates program updates are included in that as well and then again I'm Mallerie Anderson um and I am the coordinator of the program so there are going to be multiple staff working on this program uh so we also have a packaging at MPCA um email but you're welcome to reach out with to me with any questions Great. Thank you, Mallerie. This is so helpful to learn about. And now is the time to ask Mallalerie any burning questions you have. Um either, you know, raise your hand and then you can unmute or put it in the chat if you'd rather not unmute and speak. Um whatever works for you um for questions. So, we'll just give it some time. See if anybody has any of those. And if you can't figure out the raise hand button, feel free to just unmute yourself and ask. All right. I guess we're EPR experts so far. I want to say I think it's really exciting that you know especially with the compostable product labeling law and then you know just EPR in general it's helping hold manufacturers responsible for helping to fix this problem instead of constantly having the end of management on collection and recycling and disposal on us as consumers or on governments to do that. you know, there's producers that are making these things. They should have some skin in the game, so to say, on making sure they work in a system that they're putting these products out into. So, that's exciting. >> I do see a question in the chat. Um, Liz asked, "Are there any incentives to encourage more compostable packaging? My understanding is that plastic can only be recycled so many times. Yeah. So the the law does follow the Minnesota waste management hierarchy. Uh so the producer responsibility organization and producers are required to reflect that hierarchy in their program plan. And that means waste reduction is the first priority, reuse is the second priority. Um pretty and then you know recycling, composting uh are secondary priorities. And so there will be an effort to prioritize and build up waste reduction, reuse, recycling, uh, and think about those aspects as as part of their environmental impact. So really thinking about what's the best option for the for the service provided or the um packaging type, for example. So yes, I would anticipate seeing u more encouragement of potentially reusables or compostables um in the future to try and and help reduce kind of the environmental impact of packaging and paper products. Awesome. Also, I got a I got a question here in the chat. Oh, looks like Jill has one as well. Um Jill's mentioning she's noticed many restaurants have been switching to paperbased to-go containers and products usually don't have a compostable side on them. Um do we know if those can be recycled? A lot of paper is in a weird gray area. And Ally, I don't know if you also have an answer to this, but um >> yeah, >> a lot of plastic lined paper is not very desirable because uh they they use like a plastic lining to create a a barrier between the paper and the food. And so we're we're definitely in an experimentation and an adjustment phase. Um, and I think as we move forward, you'll see more either compostable or recyclable packaging and less of these packaging that is very in the middle of probably not recyclable, definitely not recyclable or maybe compostable. So, um, I think we're still seeing a lot of packaging that's very confusing. Um, and you and we will hopefully start to see that phase out over the next few years. Mhm. Totally. I think my favorite packaging product is the good old red and white food boat that is labeled on the bottom for most places recyclable. Um it is not. And compostable, it's plastic lined. So unless it's BPI certified compostable, um we know we don't want it in the composting or organics container. But then figuring out if it's recyclable typically has some con convoluted answers. Is is it food soiled? You know, what type of paper product is it? So Jill, if you have a specific question ever on certain ones, feel free to shoot, you know, a picture of the product over to me and I'm happy to kind of help navigate or troubleshoot that. All right. And I got I was going to mention earlier, I got one question. And I think maybe it was just individually to me instead of in the chat, but um there's one question about um the paint law. So the question was kind of related to is this similar to the paint law in the sense that paint manufacturers kind of pay into the program in advance or they kind of tack on that cost for recycling and kind of managing the paint in the paint purchase cost. so that you know end of life can be considered or is this a different thing entirely is this question. >> Yeah, I'll try to answer it quick. So um in the paint law the manufacturers don't have financial responsibility. You and I pay for that program when we buy paint. And so this law is very different in that it requires producers to pay. And because the cost of packaging is so variable and theoretically um this could save producers money, this could cost them a little money, but in in the grand scheme of things, um we really want producers to be making those decisions and paying for the program. So you and I won't see a change on the receipt when we buy products associated with this law. It'll have to be sorted out behind the scenes by the producers and how they cover the cost of the program. So we they're not allowed to pass on the costs to us as uh like a fee on at our when we are out shopping. Um so it's an internalized model. They need to sort out how to pay for the program. Um and in some cases there could be potential money savings. In some cases, it it may cost money, but um at this point um we don't know the full picture yet. >> Awesome. Okay, great. Well, thank you for your time, Mallerie. I we really appreciate you being here to share more about this. And again, Mallerie's contact information will be on the slides provided, so feel free to reach out to her with anything else. So, thanks again. Oh, I see some clapping hands. Woohoo. Look at those reactions. Yes. Um so we're going to jump in here um to our panel um all about going bulk with a focus on the cafeteria. So the first two presentations are going to be focused on bulk milk on tap and then we're going to learn about other ways we can go bulk in the cafeteria. So I'm going to share here and I'm also going to intro our our three presenters. So, we're lucky enough to have three presenters um for our first kind of presentation from Waconia Public Schools to kick us off. Um Barb Shank is the director of nutrition services. She's dedicated over 20 years to the field of school child nutrition. As director, she leads district-wide initiatives focused on creating healthier, more sustainable meal programs and is a strong advocate for integrating fresh local ingredients into school meals, committing to shaping a positive nourishing food culture for all students. Um, joining us, Barb is also Tracy Braun. She's the assistant director of nutrition services and has over 30 years of experience in ch school child nutrition as well. She brings deep institutional knowledge and a passion for operational excellence and has played a key role in advancing scratch cooking in schools, promoting kitchen efficiency and mentoring the next generation of nutrition professionals. And uh lastly, we have Chris Brunworth, assistant kitchen manager at Waconia High School, um who has spent the last 30 years working directly in school kitchens, bringing an invaluable hands-on perspective to the team. um as assistant kitchen manager at Wakonia High School. Uh Chris is known for creative scratch cooking, minimizing food waste, and inspiring students to try new and adventurous foods. Her practical experience ensures that great ideas translate into real results on the lunch tray. So together, collectively, they're very passionate about local sourcing, scratch cooking, reducing food waste, and helping kids become more adventurous, confident eaters. So, we're really excited they're here today to share their journey and strategies um in developing lifelong healthy habits and supporting academic acu success. So, take it away public schools. >> Um great. Thank you, Ally. Thank you for inviting us to this event. Um we're really um thrilled to be here and share our our experience and our um our journey on bulk milk. The reason we uh uh so I don't know if you can see us to here but um you can move to the next slide here. We were kind of researching back in our minds as to like why did we why did we go to bulk milk and we've been using bulk milk systems in our district for six years. We're a district of 4,000 students. We have five schools, three elementary, a middle, and a high school. And um the reason that we we went down this path were the three taglines here. the waste, taste and trash. We also have Tracy who is a dairy farmer in her in her second job and and just her interest and then my background which was also my grandparents had a dairy farm. We've just been tied to local sourcing and and good fresh clean ingredients and keeping things simple. Um, so as we went down this path, we understood that, you know, the waste looked really, really true. Every single day kids would take a whole carton of milk and every day if they take a sip or not, or if they would come to the line and they'd want to dump their tray, they'd have to open their carton if they hadn't opened it and dump it out. We saw this waste every day. But when there was a grant that came into into site that was offering um like a farm to school initiative to install milk program like bulk milk programming. We started to take a closer look at our waste and our waste was shocking when we stopped and we asked our our team members to say like how many gallons are you tossing out a day? And so we recognized you can see the value here in our district of five schools. We were dumping 20 gallons a day, which was 500 gallons a week, which equaled 20,000 gallons a year. That was really tragic to see in real terms of if you think about a milk crate or even if you, you know, like what four gallons fit into a milk crate and you start to do the math, you just think about this mountain of crates that would be full of milk that just get dumped out. and and Tracy being a dairy farmer and my family having that background too just made us recognize that that just isn't sustainable and that's not right. Then the trash also compounded by the fact that the milk all came out of cartons. And so then that mountain of cartons to total those 20,000 gallons a year that got dumped out was over half a million. That's terrible. So as we went through that process, we knew too when we had milk delivered, sometimes cartons would be cracked open or they wouldn't seal correctly. And so we had just sticky cartons and crusty cartons and >> the milk coolers would just be full. We'd have to take uh take time to clean them all the time. Um >> and the smell when you'd open the the milk coolers were just kind of not wonderful. So um you know when you pour a glass of milk out of a carton, it's different or out of your jug at home or whatever. It's different than what these little 8 oz glasses taste. You can flip to the next screen please. Um, so with those with those pieces in mind, we started down the path of partnering. So we I sat at a admin meeting early on and I presented the concept of putting bulk milk dispensers into our kitchens into our our cafeterias and I was just surveying principles to see what interests they had. And I think I came with a lot of passion because with the waste information, with the garbage information, they didn't really know much about the taste, but I think that that really stuck to them. That really impacted them. And all five principles agreed solidly to allow us to implement the pro the program at the next school year. At the same time, the department of a gave us uh two grants, I think, to install milk dispensers in schools, and we had a fund balance to support us. And then with Tracy's background in in her dairy business, we had a a partnership with Midwest Dairy that helped us also um like purchase our glasses. >> Next slide, please. So that was in 2019. Those were our partners, you know, getting that full support by our principles. So, you know, submitting for grants, getting the the support and even networking, you know, networking with the dairy farmers and um just that whole structure of you people who have that same passion. They want to they want everybody to have the good experience of quality nutrition, quality flavor, and and this was just brand new in 2019 to I think the state of Minnesota. >> Next slide, please. Um, so Tracy and I said about exploring what are our options or they uh we had had our milk coolers supported by our um our dairy our distributor. Yep. >> And so we had to go out and buy new equipment. Nobody had dispensers to to share to us or to loan to us. So as we researched we knew that you know we wanted enough milk available for the whole meal service. We didn't know how the rotation would work, but our best option was this triple spout dispenser. And then we chose one for each elementary and two for the high school. Initially, um we in some situations we needed some standalone tables, some extra totes for the milk so that they could be staged to transition in and then the 8 oz glasses and 12 oz glasses were what we chose initially. Next slide, please. I think the next slide is Okay. So, um, as the equipment came into play, we were able to, um, oh, we had a whole summer to get this underway. So, we had time to measure, to cut down tables, to have our custodial staff support us in getting them mounted to the counters so that they would be a safe practice. Um, what else we're thinking here? We created posters to encourage kids. We um >> well, we spent the Barb and I spent the whole summer where we we could only possibly imagine and of course our staff had a ton of questions like how are we going to do this? How are we going to know how to when we should switch this milk out? Um what is the best weight ergonomically to lift them up into? Because each um five gallon bag weighs 45 pounds. So you can imagine and then um we such a >> water balloon. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I mean it's not easy as Chris can say um when when we first started to lift these bags out of a milk crate and put them into the crates that they need to be in. Um >> you can go to the next slide, Ally, because you'll see some pictures I think what we're talking about. And um you know, Barb and I worked diligently all summer just coming up with best practices to train our staff before school started of how to manage this milk. Um, one of the things in the photos that you might see, it is um probably the the middle, the second row in the middle, you'll see that there is a white or um uh >> stainless steel >> stainless steel >> barrier >> barrier. And we realized that that barrier really didn't help much. Um, and we didn't really understand exactly why it was there. and it kind of hindered and took some time to fold that down and then fold it back up. And so we just decided to remove that along with the drip tray that you might see. Um >> in the bottom right you'll see a drip tray. >> We chose to take those off as well. It seems a little odd that we would do that, but our whole um thought process, excuse me, was we really didn't want students to take the time to put the cup on the drip tray. We we trained them to do a one-handed pour. So, as you can imagine, in school lunch, we have a very limited time to serve these students, and we wanted to get them through as efficiently as possible. So, a lot >> top right you'll see a picture of the one-handed pour that we put pictures up on the milk dispensers to coach kids to not set their milk that we didn't give them a tray to set it down and coach them how to pour with one hand so they wouldn't set their tray and use two hands just to facilitate >> right and so in place of the drip tray um our teams have come up with different ways and methods to handle drips um some some staff will put a market tray underneath there some staff will put a little um like a third size camro under each one. So >> a towel >> a towel. Um they've all come up with their own different ways that that all work just fine. >> All right, next slide. So it was kind of unique that we started bulk milk in all schools on the first day of school. And that could only have been accomplished by these partnerships that I said that we had with Midwest Dairy. So, we had a dairy princess at one of the schools. We had local dairy farmers st like staged at each one of our sites to they they knew the process because we had them in over the summer to like showcase where we're at, what we're doing and get their understanding and um knowledge and then they they had time so they were able to come, they were able to stand and they were able to coach and encourage. Um the American Dairy Association members also showed up and then we incorporated as many school support staff as we could to coach kids to to take milk. And so at the beginning, you know, kids would mix and match and they would fill their cup to the brim and then they were used to having a dump bucket. And our goal was to coach kids to take what they drink and drink what they take just to kind of give accountability to what they're putting on their lunch trays, what they're putting in their glasses. and we were kind of sharing all this information about all this waste that we were experiencing with these cartons just to kind of give accountability to it. And so students really stepped up to it and principles allowed us to not put dump buckets in place. Um we had a little bit of concern at the very first three or four days about having too much milk in their glass, but after that kids adapted. We allowed kids to come back for more if they wanted more milk. And um that turned out to be there was like some hot days where or you know some good days and bad days that where kids would have chugging contests but that was limited because staff were able to step in and and minimize that. Um that question was well we'll deal with those later. Um uh that turned out to be a really successful yes um promotion. Drink what you take, take what you drink. So, up until now, I think I think only one school has put a dump bucket back, but it's minimal. I think they throw out threequarters of a gallon of milk a day. So, from 20 gallons to 3/4 of a gallon. >> Okay, next slide, please. Oh, this is the kickoff. Um, on the left side is a dairy princess. In the middle is uh the dairy association support staff who were there in the summer to get exposure exposure to our program. In the top right is a principal and another um it's actually Tracy's daughter who runs a dairy farm and me that was our kickoff. Next slide please. So you can imagine the lessons learned were every day there was something like we troubleshot I don't know probably for the first month without a doubt >> how to rotate how to anticipate how like we realized we needed another dispenser at our middle school. So we bought another middle school a dispenser for our middle school. The stainless steel tables were a good success and some we needed to move some off of our elementary counter and put it on stainless steel tables to have just room for everything to spread out. Um, we were audited by MDE right that year and they recognized that our 8 o glass didn't allow for students to take the 8 ounces which is a required value in the offer versus serve program. So you have to offer you know all the five components. milk has to be ex they may have to be able to obtain eight ounces. And so having a 8 o glass meant that the glass had to be filled to the brim to get eight ounces. And so they declined the fact that we had 8 oz glasses. They recommended a high a bigger glass. So now we have nine and a quarter ounce glasses. We learned that kids love pouring milk. We learned that they love the taste. We we know that our waste is down significantly. I say 10 gallons a day, but it's even less than that. >> Definitely. >> Um, we learned that um, short squat glasses have less um, potential to tip and fall off at the elementary school. >> Um, we also, if we have surveyed our staff, they would we this is our going into our seventh year in this program. Chris is, you know, generally one staff member in each school kind of takes on the responsibility of orchestrating the the ro like putting the machines out, making sure they're clean, making sure the temperature is recorded, making sure they're filled, making sure we have milk in the cooler, rotating it. So, one person kind of values that responsibility and Chris is doing that at the high school and and we'll ask any other member of any other kitchen, would they ever go back? And they say they would never go back to cartons. The quality of milk is so nice. the waste is, you know, is substantially reduced and um once you get the rotation, you get the move and you get the ergonomics figured out, it's it's pretty seamless, honestly. >> Right. It is. >> I mean, our staff had so many concerns going into this. And when we first started, um just the idea of like, how often are you going to have to fill it or when should we change out the bags? And um you know there's not really one good answer for that as Chris can probably say. I mean it all depends on >> how many kids are taking milk. Um but like Barb mentioned um usually in each kitchen there's like one staff member that has been managing it and they just now after six years recognize and know when they can keep a bag in as to how full it is, how much they're going to go through. Um, so until you really do it, we can try to give you as much advice as possible, but once you're in it, you you figure these things out. >> Um, some statistics that are also interesting from the financial side is that bulk milk was slightly less expensive than carton milk. And you can imagine we're not dumping as much as we we're not dumping we're kids are drinking what they take. And so when we do the math, kids are drinking 27% more milk out of the bulk milk system than they were when they had carton milk and dumping milk out. That was a significant improvement. We also thought that um oh gosh, one other thought I had um I haven't really looked at our milk expenses, like what's our our full total bill, but it has to be less. But it's true and right as to what students are drinking. Well, and I think the other thing um a lot of times we get this question as you know like Barb's kind of gone down this path about is it less expensive or is it what we can honestly say is we're we're really having less milk brought into our buildings but the milk that is being brought into our buildings is being consumed rather be than being wasted. >> Right. >> That makes sense. >> Yeah. and and we would like to say that um we we've tried and tried all these we we can't even remember all the things that went wrong because we've had all these solutions and if anybody's interested in in attempting this in their district or at a school, we really think that anybody who wants to should come to one of our elementaryaries, come to one of our high schools, survey the staff, watch the operation, see the nuances of how it works so you feel confident in some of these things that we forgot that we fixed, right? Okay, you can flip to the next slide, please. >> Um, we're kind of at the end of our thoughts about implementing it and we love it. Um, we want to support it. If anybody else has interest, if there are questions, Ally, we're ready for those. >> Awesome. Thank you all. Thanks for sharing. This is such I mean you're just a staple and I feel like our community related to um a school district that's been doing this for a while. So you are the gurus over there on bulk milk. So thanks for being here. Um Rachel, do we have uh questions in the chat? >> Yeah. So, um I'm just going to I might be repeating some things here, but um so there's a little bit of discussion about what material the glasses are made out of and Alli's answered that to be um reusable harder plastic or stainless steel. Um if you guys have anything more to add to that, um feel free to chime in. Okay, sounds good. Um and then another question about um cereal. So, are kids like taking a cup and collecting milk and then dumping it in a cereal bowl or they're bringing the cereal bowl right up to the dispenser? >> Either one would work. We don't have a lot of cereal in our district. We are doing different kind of breakfast options, but >> yeah, for breakfast, we usually have the cereal in the container and then they'll just >> Yeah. just to the dispenser and >> Yeah. >> Awesome. Um, another question. Um, where are who is your vendor for the bulk milk? >> Stony Creek out of Avon is our vendor and and they bulk milk might be a little hard to find. When we were searching for it, we were using Hastings initially and then now they're not in existence, but Stony Creek is our vendor. >> Great. >> Stony Creek. Awesome. Thank you so much. Um, another question is, um, how, uh, were custodial staff on boarded with this initiative? Um, they were a part of the conversation to a limited degree. I mean, where they get involved like their garbage is like I don't know like a quarter of what it used to be honestly. I mean, that dramatically dropped. So, they I think that they appreciated that. There are some milk spills. That's a big concern that people have with regard to switching to boat milk, but it's it's just kind of it's just not even noticed anymore. >> It's become part of their daily routine. So, we don't really hear much about it. >> I don't know if a milk spills every day even. No, >> not very often. >> Kids slow down. Kids get quieter when they have to concentrate on their milk. So, those are like un unknown improvements to our lunchroom experience, too. So, um I think it was minimal for them. They don't have to dump the milk. They have less garbage. So, I think unbeknownst to all of us, they had a win. >> Love that. Um another question. Um I believe this is the maybe the last one. Um do they or do are you aware of um if there's lactosefree milk in bulk or if you've seen that or put that in place at all? It's such a minimal number of students who have it in our district. We buy it, we buy our milk at Aldi's, our lacto reduced or free milk and we pour it in cups and we have it available for students to pick it up in a strategic place so that they feel confident in getting the milk they need but um I don't know of lactosefree milk in bulk. >> Awesome. Um >> some more questions. >> Sorry, Megan, Bernard and Jeff, did you have a question? No, it it was already uh it was already asked and answered. Thanks. >> Okay. Um few more questions. Um and we have some it looks like some kitchen questions related to dishwashing. Maybe we wait for so our next presenter is related to bulk milk as well. So maybe we can kind of have both Jackie who's gonna speak from Orino public schools and um you know our presenters Barb Tracy and Chris answer that together. >> I don't know maybe they both have input. >> Up to you Ally. >> Okay. Yeah. Let's let's move on just just in the interest of time and then we can also we'll have a little time for questions at the end of all three panelists um because we have two more to get to. Um but I'm going to introduce our next speaker. Um our next speaker is going to showcase how they serve bulk milk in a uniquely different way at their district. Um so thanks again Wakonia Barb Trac and Chris will be here hanging out. Um so you'll have time to ask them a few other questions as well. Um, but Jackie Doma is our next speaker. She's the coordinator of child nutrition at Orino Schools. She'll be starting her 10th year in the district. Um, she's passionate about feeding students and ensuring that what we're creating um is an environment that is healthy and educational for students. Introducing bulk milk to her district has been a great way to peique student interest in milk consumption and decrease uh student waste. During her free time, she loves riding bikes, cross-country skiing, and gardening. So, thanks for being here, Jackie. I think you're going to share your screen. >> Yeah, absolutely. And Ellie, I don't have the sharing rights right now. So, um I can start talking. >> Okay, let me >> let me give those to you. I think I can do that. Or you know what? I have it here. Is it okay if I share on my end? >> Yeah, that works for me. >> Okay. Awesome. All right, it's up. Wonderful. Well, thank you again for having me today and um it's a pleasure to talk about bulk milk with you. Um Barb and Wakcomia and their entire team has been such a leader in Minnesota in um starting up bulk milk and really showing how it can be a great success. So, um I would definitely say that Waconia was one of the reasons that we moved to Bulk Milk. Um, and then once we got into bulk milk, we decided, well, what else can we do with it? So, we um watched a a new webinar on bulk milk and it showcased a new system that had milk in a remote setting. So, our milk is in our walk-in coolers and it's pumped through lines and served on the serving line just like a beer system would, but it is milk and not beer. and it is not carbonated. So, um if you want to move to the next slide, Ally, >> um just like Wakonia mentioned, um we did it for the same three three reasons. We did find it does reduce the amount of waste. Our custodians are dumping less milk at the end of the day. Um there's a huge environmental benefit. We have less garbage and recycling of cartons, which is decreasing our recycling cost. And then the pure taste. Um it doesn't smell like cardboard. it's cold. We find that kids love it. They will go back and they will buy three cups of milk. Um we charge for every additional glass in our district and we find that parents aren't complaining about it. They're happy that they're consuming it. So that's wonderful. Um next page. So who's involved in making the changes? Um, so the food service director is really the most responsible person for organizing all of the logistics of bulk milk. Um, we also have the manager and staff involved because they're handson in cleaning the system, making sure kids understand it. Um, communicating any challenges with the machines. Um, principles need to be on board. Um especially if you have a breakfast program that might be in the classroom. They might say um like our district said, "We'll accept bulk milk, but we can't serve it in the classroom because kids are walking up and down stairs and there would be a higher risk of spills there." Um buildings and grounds, they were heavily involved in our installation. And then the dairy company, um as Barb said, not every dairy company offers five gallon um bags of bulk milk. So, making sure that you do your research ahead of time to find out what is available for you um is super important. Um if you want to go to the next slide, here's kind of in detail of what I just said there. Um, speaking more about the dairy company, we have a dairy vendor that um, we went out to bid for with um, a few other districts and um, we found that their prices for bulk milk were higher than if we went to a different distributor. So um, we ended up using Hagar Dairy. Um, Matt Hagar is the owner of that and we um, just use them for our bulk milk. Um, and we use our primary dairy vendor for um, all other carton products. Um, and in our district, we just have bulk milk running at one school at this time. Um, next slide. Two other important um, pieces of involving this change. Minnesota Department of Education. Um they provide guidance on bulk milk and if your school is getting a nutritional review, they will want to see milk before the point of sale. Um so if you do have milk after the point of sale, it makes it very challenging in your nutritional reviews. So, um do the best that you can to make sure that milk is a part of the line and it is um given to the student before they check out at the register. Um and if your district in is in a situation that you can't do that, I recommend reaching out to MDE in advance just so then you have that partnership with them to show that you did follow through with all the steps. You did the best situation that you could that was possible. Um, and the other group to be involved with is the Minnesota Department of Health. Um, you will need permission to purchase the new equipment. So, this is something I did not do when I purchased my latest machine and they came for annual inspection and they said, "What is this contraption?" And I said, "It's a bulk milk dispenser." And they said, "We know nothing about this. How does it work?" Um, so luckily they were able to approve it. Um, I don't recommend this because it kind of like fractures the relationship that you have with them, but they did accept it and and they did think it was pretty cool that we were able to do a remote milk system. Going to go to the next slide. Um, marketing the program. Bulk milk is quite different. It's not just switching like a pre-wrapped hamburger to a build your only hamburger on the line. Um there's it's a new concept for kids. It's an open liquid that kids are now carrying around. So there's lots of benefits, but the more that you um are able to market your program um and get support from community, the easier it is on your startup. So we get parent volunteers to help out for the first few days of the school year. Um, and that's just to help the new grades that are coming in understand how does this smoke system work. Um, it's also a great way to communicate with those parents of like this is our serving line. These are the awesome options that we're serving our kids every day and it gets them on board. Um, some other groups that can be involved if you don't want to use parents, you can get a green team that you have at your school, the football team, the cheerleaders, any student group that would want to be involved. um would be great. Um and like Wakonia said, inviting a local dairy farmer or processor. That was a great way to promote it and showcase to the farmers like the end results of their product. And then we also um utilize a lot of resources through Midwest area to inform families through social media, newsletters, and principal messages just to let them know of the change. Next slide. All right. So, as Barb talked about, they have a gravity system which we use for our first year of bulk milk. And then, um, we have recently moved in the last two years to a remote system where we have limes pumped through the refrigerator, through the ceiling, and down to the serving line to serve our kids. So, kind of the pros and cons of each of them that we found. The gravity system is a super easy setup. Um, if you want to go back one slide, Ally. Yep. Thank you. Um, it's basically plugand play. So, you plug it in, you put the milk in, and the milk dispenses by gravity. There's no other systems involved. Um, the nice thing about this is the students can control the amount served. And they can also mix flavors. So, if they want like half white milk, half chocolate, they can do that. Um, some of the cons of this is when the bags run out, you need the students to stop and wait because you have to open up the entire machine to switch out just one bag. So, oftentimes we wait for two bags to run out before we switch it just because it's a lot of time involved. Um, the bags are also heavy to lift. So, having training, we usually have two people replace the milk when we're using the gravity system because it is heavy and awkward and you're up tall. All right, next slide, please. All right, so the other type of system that we have is a remote system. So, as you can see, this machine, it's a cleaner profile. It's smaller on the line. Um, and you press the button once and 8 ounces of milk automatically dispenses. And you don't need to lift any bags between service. All of your milk is in the refrigerator. You basically um unplug the connector from one bag and you plug it into the next one. Um and you can have up to three bags running at a time per line. So melt can be a continuous flow without ever having to stop. Um some of the cons of this is it does require an installation team to come in and install the full milk machine. We did this in August and we were down to the very last minute before school started to make sure that we could get our milk up and running. Um, so it was definitely a learning curve for us, but I think the installation teams now that they're doing more of these in schools, they're um more understanding of the requirements on their side as well. Um, another con is it involves regular cleaning of the line. So, at the end of every week, we put a cleaning solution through the lines to get all of the milk out so that it doesn't sit in the lines over the weekend. The lines are insulated, but it's just a good practice to keep them clean so then you don't have buildup of calcium or other um milk proteins in the line. Um, it's also a permanent setup, so where you put your milk machine is not going to move. So, if you're doing any special event event and you want to rearrange your lunch line or it's in the cafeteria and that cafeteria space is also utilized by other um groups after school, you have to keep that in consideration. And then there is a higher cost for equipment and the installation process for the remote systems. All right, next slide. Um I'm going to just skip this video Ally just due to timing if that's okay. Um but the slides will be available um after the presentation so you can watch it. But this just shows how to how the gravity systems work. And then this is a picture of how remote systems work. So, um, what you have is you have a refrigerating chiller unit that's within your kitchen and that's connected to a CO2 tank and that then is connected to a control board which when you're pressing the milk button, it then um, pumps the milk through the milk crates into the refrigerated trunk line which goes up and through our ceiling. On a lot of new um school builds, they'll go under the um floor and up. Um so it it varies based on if it's a new build or a remodel and then that goes to the dispenser on the lunch line and that's how you get your milk pumped. So, how this has kind of impacted us is we then had to create a wall of space in our walk-in cooler for milk that before was just in our um cartons of our milk coolers. So, it did utilize some space. If you want to go to the next slide, Ally, you can see this wall. Oh, this wall used to be for like um whole fruit like apples and pears and oranges. Um, and now it is utilized by milk crates. And this was a picture taken at the end of the school year, but normally there are um about 12 milk crates set up here to pump lines through to the the serving line. All right. Um, like Barb said, we use a polycarbonate cup. Um, it's a 10 oz cup and it has a ripple line. um where if you fill up to the ripple line, it is eight ounces. So, if you're using the gravity fed, we just told kids to fill their cup up to the ripple line. Um and ours automatically dispenses 8 ounces, so we don't really have to worry about that. But the fatter the base, the better for service because the milk does tend to um spill a little bit. It very rarely we hear that we're having to mop up any milk. It's usually like a little bit of milk that spills onto their plate and it does slow the kids down through the line. So, we do appreciate that fact. Um, and then I just recommend that if you do go this route, get twice the amount of cafeter or cups as your cafeteria seats. So, if your cafeteria seats 200 kids by 400 cups to start, you're not going to use lose a lot, but you will over time. And it's just nice to make sure that if you have like a really busy day and your dishwasher can't keep up, you'll have enough um cups for the next line as well. All right. So, like I said before, the location of your bulk milk machine, um if it's it's best if it's placed before the point of sale. So, this is a picture of our serving line at our intermediate school. And as kids walk in, the first step that they do is they get their milk. And after they get their milk, they're able to grab their tray and go through the line. And then they do the point of sale checkout at the end. So keep that in mind when planning. Um, you can see the stainless steel pillar. Um, that is a new installation that we had to have with the uh remote system just to move the milk through the ceiling and then directly down into the milk machine. All right, this is just a quick video of our milk machine in action on my end. I'm not sure if it is on yours, but simply they've pressed the button one time and 8 o of milk passes. Um, it doesn't slow down the line. The kids do a great job with it. And, um, it's a very slick process. So, Ally, I think you can move forward. I think it's frozen on my end. Can you see the next slide? >> Um, I cannot. >> Uh, oh, let's >> cost. >> Yep. Are you on milk cost on your end or No, >> no, I still see the video. >> Well, let's see. Let's try I'll try stop sharing. and I can talk about it while you try to pull it up. Um, so unlike Barb's situation, our bulk milk prices were higher than carton. So we had to keep that into consideration. We also moved to bulk milk when we did have some excess fund balance to move to this process. Um, and when you think about it, the cost of milk was higher, but we're spending less on recycling. We're spending less um in the amount of waste. And um when you kind of like look at the total cost at the end of the day, it's kind of a wash for us. So, um we have increased our mo prices now to 60 cents per cup. Um, but we still feel like that is a fair price for anyone getting an additional glass of milk. Obviously, milk is free when they're consuming it with free breakfast or lunch. So, that is one of the benefit. Um, and it was really the quality of bulk milk is why we wanted to make that change. So, it wasn't a co as costefficient for us, but we wanted to keep quality and just the environmental factors into account. Um, as far as equipment costs, there is a huge price difference between the gravityfed and the remote system. So, a gravityfed dispenser is around $3500 to $5,000. Um, and then you do have to have like the stainless steel stand with that. Um, and the remote system is about $16,000 plus installation. Um, so that was a huge price point for us. So we did have to consider like, okay, are we committed to using this machine? Um, and we have it, we love it. It's been wonderful, but it was a huge cost upfront. Um, I do feel that the community sees it and they're in support of it. They think it's really cool that we have milk on tap. Um, and so for us it was a huge win. Um, but definitely keep that price point under consideration. Um, and news from Ally is that she talked to the milk company and they have another model that will be coming out in the future um, that will be a little bit less. So, um, there's not as much installation involved, but it will be able to pump milk from a cooler below the dispenser directly into the dispenser. So, that should take care of some of the installation costs as well as um making cleanup easier and some other things like that. Um Alli, I'm just going to keep continuing talking until we have the presentation up. Um but we did take some um look at some data that we pulled for milk consumption and we just looked at the allocart milk consumption. So, nut milk consumed through free breakfast or lunch meals. Um, but we just those that were purchasing the meal as an extra. So, they either brought milk from or brought lunch from home and they were buying the milk or they were buying additional glasses of milk. So, we did find that when we moved to the gravityfed dispenser in 2022, we had a huge increase in bulk milk um consumption. And I do think a lot of that is due to flavor and just like the new factor. So that was huge. Then we went to the remote system where the kids had to press the button and then the 8 ounces dispense and it was pretty steady. Um we lost only 200 cups per year um in service. And I would say I was still pretty happy with that because I knew that especially with the third through fifth grade age range, it would they're big at new big on new things and then the excitement kind of wears off. Um and then this last year, our numbers dipped quite a bit, but um I don't think our milk consumption has dipped as much. So I think more kids that are getting the free and reduced or free meals are also consuming their free milk with that. So, um, that's kind of what we found for participation. Um, and my recommendations for moving forward. So, it can be as simple or complex as you would like. Um, I definitely recommend trying gravityfed dispensers first and then once you get that established, then think about piloting a um a remote system in the future just because there's a lot more involvement to that and you want to make sure that you get buy in from your community and your staff first. Um, and then definitely look for grants. Um, you guys are very lucky that you're within Dakota County because I know that they are very supportive of bulk milk and they might have a few opportunities within your county to for financial assistance. Um, otherwise past grants have been available through Midwest Dairy, the Chefan Foundation, egg grants. So talk to your local um, also talk your local dairy farm to see if they're willing to help out with any of the costs. And um there there should be a lot of support within your district. Um other than that, that is all I have. Looks it looks like you found the slides. So great, they're up and running again. Um my contact information is at the very end. So if anyone has any questions or want more information or would like to see our remote system, um we're more than happy to give you tours of how our system works. Thanks so much, Jackie. Um, yes, lots of applauses. Ally, I don't know if you're still in here or not. Do we want to go through questions or should we just move right along to the next presentation? We're gonna go through questions because I don't uh Oh, wait. No, I've got it here. We'll do questions at the end. I've got the next got locked out of here. Thanks for your patience, everyone. in Dakota County um got rid of all of our Zoom licenses. So, we have to use Microsoft Teams now. And um as you can you have experienced firsthand, it's kind of uh can be a little frustrating sometimes. So, really appreciate it. Um >> Rachel, I'd be happy to answer a few questions as you're kind of taking care of logistics on your end. >> Let's get into some questions because I need access to the next PowerPoint which I just requested. Um so let's see where did we leave off? Um we left off about um if anyone could comment on uh kitchen staffing impact for um the added dishwashing that comes with using um these cups for bulk services. >> You want to speak to >> I don't feel that it's that much. >> You're on. Oh. Um, I guess you just kind of get into a routine and I don't feel like it's affected us that much. >> We we coach kids on just how to stack them into racks so they're kind of pre- racked, >> right? And >> and we chose to not go with the um compartment um >> style glass racks. We just use a flat rack um just for a lot of different purposes. Um, and >> we came up with a drip tray, too, that cotton milk at the bottom when kids would put them into the rack to help us put them pick it up and put it through the dish. Um, there's a size that fit our racks really well, too, >> that we we got off of Amazon. >> And the other thing that it's important to know, like even with the smaller cup, like if you get a normal flat rack, you have to have the extender for them to stack properly. Um, so you need one extender on your flat racks. And I guess the other thing that I do want to mention is the placement of your cups at the be at the line wherever your milk is. Um, instead of putting like a single flat rack of cups, what we choose to do is we take one flat rack and we stack probably five or six high. >> And that way it gets us through at least one and maybe even more than one, >> two lunch shifts. Um, so that I mean we have enough cups so that we're not having to rotate cups into the lunch service that may have come that might not be dry so that we're stacking them wet. And also you don't want to have a cup that just came out of the dishwasher that's warm that kids are now going to pour their cold milk into. So, I'd say it is really important, as Jackie said, to have enough cups on hand to rotate them through. And I think we have a similar experience in that our staff has found that cleaning the cl the cups is very easy. Um, we use the glass racks. Um, so it fits 25 cups per rack. the kids can um automatically put their like their cup upside down in the rack so that when it's full, it's just ready to go through the dish machine. And then we take those racks directly back to the line and then um serve them just from the flat rack. So, it's not the most beautiful presentation. We look to find if we could like do a cup dispenser of some sort, but um using the hard plastic, they don't really work with that. Um, and yeah, I would say our staff is on board. I think they like it. They like the taste of it as well, so they can see the benefit. So, it was pretty easy to implement. Um, and then there was another question. We'll just go ahead, Rachel, and keep moving forward until >> Yeah. So, sorry to interrupt you. Um, I have two more questions, but I think um, one of them is related to what we're talking about, and then I'm going to save the next one for after this upcoming presentation because I think maybe um, we might get some ideas. So, um, follow up to uh, kitchen staff um, impacting um, there's a question about um, how many kitchen staff is recommended to tend to the bulk milk station and the like lunch or salad bar? Um, I'm at the high school and we basically we rotate there. Everyone rotates positions. So, each person that does the milk has a certain amount of duties and it's basically one person that will change out milk if needed in between lunches. We kind of have it set up that I actually fill the milk in the morning um the holders and put and I I tend to do it that it just works out usually we have enough filled that we basically if we have to fill replace one or two bags throughout a four time lunch period is about all we do. So it's basically one person that does this job. And I would say um with our remote system, we have two people, the manager and one other long hour cook that um really kind of run the milk system. But um we've really tried to encourage them to like crossrain it so that everyone knows how this works. It's easy enough for anyone to figure out. Um, it's not a complicated system like um an ice cream soft serve machine where it's just like this is complicated. If you screw it up, you're going to break the machine. I think the milk systems are really easy. Um, and the more people that you have involved with it, like I said, the bags are heavy, so um, many hands make light work. >> Great. Thank you so much um for your presentation, Jackie. Um, I am ready to go with the next one. So, um, let's get started. >> And I'm back here, too, Rachel. Um, thanks for helping, fill in. Um, but if you have it up, that works great. >> I had to restart my whole computer. So, >> hopefully you were able to get through Jackie's presentation as well. Thanks, Jackie, for presenting. Did you were you able to find it in the files? >> I think I've got it up. It's zero waste lunch. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. For Megan and Jeff. >> So, I'm going to let you do introductions and I'm gonna just I'll man this. >> Okay, perfect. Yeah, it's all about flexibility, right y'all? Uh, I don't know what happened. Apparently, that video sent my computer into outer space. So, um, here I am. I'm back. Um, so thanks for being here, Megan and Jeff. Uh, so I'm going to just introduce them as speakers. You can go to the next slide, please, Rachel. Um, so, uh, we're going to be learning from school district 197 on serving food in bulk with success, as well as their work towards a zerowaste lunch. Uh, Megan Bernard is the district sustainability manager and has led district 197 sustainability program, Live Green, since 2020. She manages the district's energy, water, waste, and natural resources in her role and leads the live green clubs, works with child nutrition, and serves as the district's wellness chair. Uh, prior to her position with the district, she ran the waste consulting firm, Innovate Waste, working primarily with Dakota County on solid waste management projects for businesses and schools. And Jeff Wolfer uh has been the district's child nutrition supervisor since 1998 and worked in K through2 nutrition for the past 31 years. He helped develop the inaugural district wellness committee in 2004 and has been part of it ever since and is a voting member of the Minnesota school food buying group since 2006, leading the big eight buying group since 2017. Um busy busy lots of stuff to do over there. Jeff. Um Jeff and Megan work closely together to develop strategies that reduce cafeteria waste and eliminate single-use plastics. So, welcome Megan and Jeff. >> Thank you, Allie. >> Thanks, Ally. >> Go to the next slide. Yep. >> Um we're going to kind of go through some of the steps uh and strategies that we use to get ourselves to a zerowaste lunch. Uh first thing obviously we wanted to do is identify the problem. And I think with a lot of the co things and just the way societal trends have been with everything comes in packages because it's easier. Um we find uh find we have a lot of uh pre-portioned individually wrapped items. And then we set an obtainable goals uh identified packaged items uh that we could use and or eliminate and go bulk. Uh utilized reusables and source BPI or compostable certified for disposable type items. uh and then figure out how to implement these with our staff and evaluate our outcomes. >> Next slide, please. >> So, step one was to identify our problem. Um we looked at single-use plastics. We started talking about this with our staff a few years ago with just reducing single-use plastics um primarily because of the health risks that they pose for children and the waste associated with them. We were seeing a lot of confusion when it came to sorting at our cafeter in our cafeterias with sorting organics, trash and recycling and what goes where. Um this was leading to a lot of contamination in both our recycling and organic streams. And we also have want to get to our goal of 75% waste diversion by 2030 and single-use plastics wasn't doing us any favors. Next slide please. So, just to just to touch on single-use plastics or plastics in general and the health risks that we're seeing specifically for children, but this applies to all of us um that plastics inter in interfere with our endocrine system by mimicking hormones. So, they are by mimicking hormones, they bind to those receptors and are blocking the production of those hormones that would naturally be occurring. American Academy of Pediatrics has since put out a statement that plastics are harmful to children's hormones, growth, and brain development. And I will say that sharing this with our child nutrition staff and just the pride that all of our child nutrition staff takes in what they what we serve and how they feed children was really impactful um for why we all wanted to get behind this. Next slide, please. >> Oh, you're welcome. No problem. And then I would would be remiss if I didn't just go over the plastic problem and really what this trend in our current society looks like. So plastic was invented not very long ago in 1907. Bake light was the first plastic and this phone is a bake light material. Um since that time plastic has increased especially since 1950 when it started being more generally used. um 230fold. So in the past 20 years, if you're looking at this graph, plastic production has doubled. Um the United States, probably not surprised, is the second highest plastic waste generator. And less than 10% is recycled. So uh you know, a lot of people think if I put it in the recycling, it gets recycled. But inevitably, a lot of it is landfilled, doesn't get put in recycling, um ends up in oceans. And as we know, not everything that gets put in recycling has a market for being recycled at this point. So, um, it's really up to all of us. And I just really, ever since I've come on board here, I've looked at how can we reduce the amount of plastic we're using. Next slide, please. >> Okay. Um, need to have individually wrapped products during lunch. uh students served in the in the cafeteria. We really didn't need to use all those. Um and lunch was probably the best place to start uh since it's always in the cafeteria unlike a lot of breakfast programs that kind of migrated especially during COVID in the classroom and uh and and where where you needed some of those IW things. Um and for that many manufacturers they've been developing these prepackaged products um just to accommodate the you know the remote serving people picking up meals things of that nature. Um so we kind of piloted a plastic free lunch days during the pre not last school but the 23 24 school year where we would do zerowaste lunch days. We did it a couple of our elementarymentaries Mandota and Pilot Knob. Uh, next slide, please. Okay. Um, there we go. Um, in identifying those uh, plastics or our step three, we began to identify those uh, during our lunch service and what we could eliminate and what we could change to bulk. And you look at the pictures here. Uh, I mean, a handful of those things in the top picture. um you know the fruit cups I mean they're a lot of our commodity fruits frozen fruits uh applesauce things of that nature come in uh compo or non-compostable cups in fact this uh for this upcoming year we consciously did not order any of those cups if we did frozen fruits we did the bulk blueberries strawberries things of that nature um and I think too kids having to serve themselves I know you get some push back where hey it's just not faster we want stuff so they can just grab it. I think that's our contribution to the monatory principles for manual dexterity. So I think we're we're contributing to the uh overall education of the kids. Next slide. Um and then getting to zero waste uh you know what things we could things we could change. Uh one example we used uh you see here is our our condiments. Um, you know, we got into a lot of packets, whether it be dressing packets, uh, condiment packets. Um, and then this is just kind of one way you see these, uh, these, uh, server express type systems. Um, you see those at like ball games and and other other venues. They're kind of like the bulk milk. They've got the dispenser bags um that just need to be changed out. And uh a lot of even the gallon items you can get the pumps not quite as clean looking but uh still the same effect. One thing we did with our taco day or our nacho day we used to use these individual bags kind of for a walking taco uh this past year moved to a bulk tortilla chip and the servers actually put these on the tray. I know there was some little push back at the beginning, but uh uh I I I think as the year went on, there was uh it it was not deemed as being a big inconvenience. So um and a lot of things were pre-portioned, too. Even on our salad bars, we'd have people doing pre-portioning cheese and pickles and things like that. um or entre that uh you know weren't self- served, putting them in a boat or putting them in a cup that the kid was just going to take and put on a tray. Um and our wraps like sandwich wraps, we use the foil wraps uh to wrap hot sandwiches and we had found uh found a compostable version and we'll talk a little bit more of that as we get down the road. Uh and then also utensils. We were using plastic utensils where we did not have uh reusable metal available and they ended up contaminating the uh you know the uh recycle or the compost uh uh waist streams. Next slide. Okay. Um and step four was you know to utilize these re reusables uh source the BPI uh certified whether it's wraps or uh cups. I mean we do for the things we do use cups for we do have compostable cups whether it be coffee cups uh and things of that nature. So it just this is kind of what our tray looks like. all the K or the kids served everything themselves from the salad bar or were served from the uh excuse me from the uh server and then the the sandwich that was pre-wrapped that was probably self-s served that's a compostable wrap and we'll see a little bit more about that as we get down the line here too. Next slide. And existing zerowaste infrastructure. Uh we've got two schools that do have metal trays. We've got one elementary uh that's been using them uh for the past year pretty successfully. Uh we do have these at our high school. We've uh we've not fully rolled it out. Um and then we also have metal utensils at three schools, a couple elementaryaries and then also our high school. Um all our like food trays, uh the things we use or the food boats, napkins, um are all compostable in all eight schools. So any of the five compartment trays we use are all compostable. Uh we have sorting stations that Megan was instrumental in in uh getting up and going. Um and then milk waste collection is also part of that where they take their cartons and dump them into a uh into the milk waste. Next slide. >> Okay. Okay. So, now we're going to talk a little bit about uh going to zero waste and what we needed to change to get there. Um, so we looked at a cost analysis of what we were using and what and finding new products um and utilizing what we had in place already. So, the I'm not going to go over what we already had in place, which was our trays and boats and napkins like Jeff talked about. Um, but these are the disposables. So, by eliminating or these are the new products that we switched to, sorry. By eliminating our single-use plastics like bags, containers, um clamshells, portion cups, lids, that reduced our spending about $10,000. Then we were using foil wraps. Um those were costing us about 6,500 a year. And plastic utensils, very inexpensive, 5,500 a year. Um, going to compostables. So, utilizing our metal utensils at our three schools. Those were purchased through a grant funds. So, those didn't cost us anything. Um, and then finding some BPI certified compostable products. So, the n the nature fresh and these are links that you can click on which will bring you to the product. Um, the compostable film, we use that for cold sandwiches um primarily at the high school. um and middle schools. I'll say the better earth and that actually the film is like a plastic wrap. It looks identical. It's clear and that was the point was they needed a clear film for the sandwiches. Um the better earth wraps which is pictured on the right. So that is a BPI compostable paper wrap. We have a short video to show you about those. Um and then the world centric utensils. Those are a compostable utensil. um pretty common. So those utensils were the hardest sell because they are so much more expensive than the plastic utensils. Um but because we could see savings by reducing those single-use plastics and also the foil wraps were almost twice the cost of the compostable wraps. We were able, as you can see, to pretty much break even at 1,500. And as we move forward implementing additional um reusable infrastructure, we only expect this to be better. Next slide, please. So, we're going to talk show you a little bit about you know really important was just approaching this project with a team approach. Um, yes, of course change is not always um, you know, fun for everybody and so talking with our staff to like identify why this is important for us and why we need their help. So when we were triing different products, we asked kitchens to try them and let us know what they thought. um and then get feedback from them and just also being responsive to like letting us know what issues they're having and then res helping find solutions to them. Um learning from one another. So if if you guys can click the video here, there's just a 50 second video we'd like to show you. And this is Jan and Cindy in our kitchen. We probably need to turn the volume on. >> I'm Jan. This is Cindy. We're going to show everybody how to use our new compostable rack. >> All right. >> You're going to put the uh burger upside down. You're going to fold it one over and you're going to go left, right, like a present. And then you're going to fold it underneath and you put it on the tray. Then what happens is once they go in the warmer, it's between um 20 minutes and a half hour. And then this is going to cling to itself. So, it'll be really tight. The bottom where this all meets is going to um melt together. Doesn't get on the food. It just attaches to itself. And that um will make it so it stays tight for the kids to grab and you don't have to worry about it coming out and falling on the floor. This is another way to wrap it. Either one works. Okay. So yeah, just wanted to share that with you. Um that it has been really successful and yep, there were little things that we needed to work through as far as you know that as far as like how the wraps were working for different schools or whatnot, but overall I will say that there was really positive feedback from our staff. Um so outcomes, we met our zerowaste lunch goal. All of our cafeterias are serving zero waste lunches every day. Um, and that's going to continue. And we have successfully eliminated the student exposure to plastics at lunch. Um, we've eliminated that single-use plastic waste which was contaminating our recycling and organic stream. Um, we've also reduced prep time by eliminating pre-portioning of products by our staff. And oh, sorry, Jeeoff, go ahead. >> No, we're good. Yeah. you know, it's reduced organics and recycling, excuse me, contamination. And as I said before, especially the utensils because they're so easy to, you know, that plastic just ends up in the in the organics and a lot of those loads were getting rejected because of that. Um, simplified the sorting. Uh, we really don't have much that goes in an actual trash container. Uh, and continued progress towards cost savings. Uh, I think it's a lot more affordable now than it was. I mean, we've been down this road probably 15 years ago where we dabbled with this compostable uh trays and and utensils. And as Megan alluded to, uh, and as Jan and Cindy, uh, folks, they have been I have heard from Hollywood, too, by the way. Uh, we've gotten positive feedback from a lot of our staff. A lot of apprehension or some apprehension at first, but uh, as we got into this, they can really see the benefits and, uh, and and have bought in and and supported it well. And we've also had a ton of support from our school board, our superintendent, uh, admin, and just staff, principles in general. So, >> and we just want to say thank you. Thank you for our child nutrition staff for working with us on this project. Special thanks to Cindy and Jan for their movie star appearance and just for their leadership in general for this project. Um, and there's our contact. If you have any questions, please reach out. or if you'd like any of the information that we shared, um, happy to help. >> Thank you. >> Yay. This was great. Thank you, Megan and Jeff. I think it probably Did Do you think it plays a factor to um having your district have a sustainability manager at the table to kind of help with this? Because I know you're one of the few districts in our county with that role. I think it takes somebody having the vision. It does, you know, I think that's always been a big vision of mine. So, that's helped a lot. But, you know, I don't see why if there's somebody in the school or especially the child nutrition staff or um that has that goal that they could achieve it. >> Yeah, Megan's been instrumental in in working with us because I I mean I have myself an an admin assistant. So having uh having Megan be able to be that liaison and spearhead uh things like this whether it be you know putting dishwashers in which we had one for the last 30 some years and uh you know doing some of those initiatives really been beneficial to have Megan >> it's been really fun I mean this is fun stuff to figure out it feels really good >> and it's very doable >> right it seems like a total team partnership. You have to have everybody kind of willing to um try new things and yeah be on board. So that's exciting. And it's is it true that in your district the majority of like the schools initially were built without the dishwashing infrastructure in place, right? >> Yes, that's yeah, correct. Even I guess going back to when I first arrived then they built the two middle schools. We have the friendly hills and heritage back in the mid 90s and they were designed without dishwashers and u it it does make it somewhat difficult trying to retrofit these things because there's exhaust hoods and and you know it's not just getting the dishwasher, you know, like slipping it under your counter. Um so it Yeah, we started basically from ground zero. >> Right. Right. Okay. Okay. Well, do you see anything in the chat for questions, Rachel? I know I know I I went to the moon for five minutes there. So, I hope that we got through um Jackie's presentation, but if anyone has any questions for either um Jeff and Megan or any of our presenters on this panel, um now's the time for Barb, Tracy, Chris, um as well as Jackie, Megan, and Jeff. Thank you so much for sharing all of these bulk resources with us. There's one more question we didn't get to. Someone asked um if breakfast is served in the classroom and if so um how do they how do they implement bulk milk techniques with that? >> We have uh we don't have breakfast in the classroom but we did and we used to send half gallons of milk with glasses with the instruction to the teachers to pour 8 ounces or offer 8 ounces. That was our solution. Yasha. >> And for us, we still have breakfast in the classroom. Um, but we do have like stairs that kids have to walk up and down in our building. So, we do just cartons of milk for breakfast. >> Perfect. And if anyone's interested in doing um bulk milk in the classroom, um I think we've done some case studies on some of our recordings from previous workshops too with a pilot out of Austin public schools in Texas. So that's pretty innovative. But um yeah, if anyone's interested, I'm happy to share resources. This is all so valuable. So thank you all for your time. And again, um I think there was a question in here I saw about the slides. Yes, they'll all be available um to request after the workshop. They'll be on a one drive folder I can give you access to. So, no need to fiercely write notes um if you're like me and a notetaker or if you miss the contact info. That'll all be shared after the workshop as well as this recording. So, yeah, and especially maybe for a few slides of Jackie's that maybe got missed because I apologize about that. >> There's one more question in the chat. Um, uh, someone mentioned that they have carpet in their school and if there are lids that they could utilize situation. >> We we do have carpet. Um, some of the classrooms are not carpeted, but we do have um, so we have a Camro cup or Carlilele also has a similar cup. Um, and they do make a disposable plastic lid that you can put on it. Um, and we tried that for a minute and it I think just created too much work for the kids to utilize it. >> Yeah. Same thing happened with us. It didn't prevent spills. It was cumbersome. It even probably caused more spills when we added a lid. >> Yeah. >> Perfect. All right. Well, thank you all again. Um, any additional questions, you can reach out directly. Um, I'm going to, um, share my screen really quick with a few quick additional resources on both of these topics. Um, so just adding to our amazing presenters. Um, Utterly Cold Milk Solutions is the company Jackie from Orino School District had partnered with for their bulk milk system using the bulk or using the tap lines. And Oro is currently the only school district with this model in Minnesota. Um, and I know Jackie mentioned they they've done retrofits as well as new construction. So, both are options. Um, but one thing to note is this company's also currently working on getting NSF certification for a new model of bulk milk uh dispensing pictured here on the right. So, you'll see on the far left is kind of the traditional steel cow. Um, you know, uh, Wakonia public schools is using this model. The model in the middle is what Jackie from Orno is using. And then on the far right is that new bulk milk dispensing. Um it's a portable system on a rolling cart and it doesn't require a line run or lifting bags overhead. Um as multiple bags are stored in that fridge underneath. So I'm just happy to share flyers or any info with schools or districts that are interested. I want to share this kind of newer thing I just learned about from this company. Then I also threw in a few resources from Chefan and Midwest Dairy. Um, which I know Jackie has at the end of her presentation too. Um, which include like a a sample bulk milk standard operating procedure training videos, toolkits, etc. And then just a quick shout out to School of Environmental Studies in District 196. They're currently our only school in Dakota County with bulk milk. Um, I know several others are interested or even have had bulk milk in the past. Um, but with, you know, issues looking for a vendor or those that like carry milk in bags and I know the Hastings Crearyy closing, um, we're looking to kind of fill out those solutions and and find, uh, solutions to those issues. So, hoping as more schools are requesting bulk milk, maybe more distributors will be able to provide it and the cost will come down even more. Um, I'm also talking to the state about the potential for a bulk milk state contract. So maybe that would help as well with that capacity issue. And then as District 187 highlighted, you know, empowering students to put items directly on their tray or serving them in bulk. Um, helps really with lots of different things including decreasing packaging and food waste. Students planning to take what they eat while still meeting meal requirements. Um, one district in our county recently shared they lowered the height of salad bars to allow students easy access to serve themselves. Another example, obviously the condiment dispensers, replacing packets or pre-portion cups. Um, and then serving in bulk helps decrease time spent purchasing, storing, preparing packaging that's used once and then thrown away um or composted. Um, as well as the cost to purchase and haul away the material. So, it's eliminating that waste and simplifying the sorting process for students. Um, and obviously with everchanging products on the on the daily, depending on the menu, um, serving in bulk really helps make sorting more successful and can oftent times save u money for schools as well. Um, so even simple changes if this isn't possible for your school or district, simple changes could be even a bulk napkin dispenser or utensil dispenser. Preventing those students from taking maybe more than one at a time can even reduce the number used um to kind of start small and scale up. Um, and then also reusable reusable products support this transition to away from single-use alternatives um with cost savings and waste reduction benefits. So, we provide grant funding for, you know, helping schools go towards reusables through our grant. Someone unmuted by chance? Could they mute themselves? >> Back if you could mute yourself. >> Okay. I'm like, is it me? Um, so we currently provide some grant funding for these items through our grant program. We funded trays, utensils, bowls, clamshells, and reusable boats and baskets. But we're open to funding, you know, any and all reusable products that might help you transition away from single-use or disposable um as well. So, in Dakota County, I just want to mention most schools are required to collect food scraps, but only from back of house kitchen spaces. So, collecting in the cafeteria is optional. But if you are going to do it, you really need the bulk service and reusable products to be successful. Um, so I've included a few resources here to help, you know, transition to reusables. There's also outside of our county grants, um, a subsidy program called plastic free restaurants that's also open to schools transitioning from single use. They basically will pay the difference to transition to a reusable item. So, just wanted to highlight those things quickly. So, as we transition topics into school food donation, take the opportunity to stand up, stretch if you need it. Um, we're going to take uh one quick poll. Um, if Rachel's able to pull that up. Um, I'm going to stop sharing so Stacey can get her slides pulled up, but we're going to transition into food rescue. So, do you currently have a food rescue program at your school or district? and Stacy, feel free to share your slides. >> Okay, I'll get that going. >> All right, it looks like maybe not sure was our top answer. A few people said yes. Um, and then some nos as well. So, a good mixture. Thanks for thanks for giving that input and I'm excited to learn more. So, Stacy, I will introduce her as she's getting her slides um pulled up. So, Stacy is a registered dietician, school nutrition specialist, and nutrition services director. After working with children, adolescence, and parents as a clinical dietician for close to eight years, she found her calling at St. Paul Public Schools and has been with the district since 2014, where she uses her background in nutrition therapy to connect students to healthy choices. Marketing, sustainability, and engagement are embedded in the foundation of St. Paul Public Schools research-based menu philosophy, and her goal is to provide students with a wealth of nutritious choices so they can show up for what matters most, their academic success. So, thank you, Stacy. >> Yes, thank you. All right. And is it allowing you to share? >> Can you see it? Because it's showing that it's on screen from my side. >> Oh, you know what? Maybe I need to stop sharing. >> Okay. >> Maybe try one more time here. >> Make sure I share one more time. Okay. One second. >> Awesome. Yep. Now we're seeing it. >> Okay. Excellent. All right. Let me start the show again. Okay. All right. All right. Fantastic. So, um, yes, thank you for the introduction. I am here to talk about not only our food rescue plan that we have at our district here at St. Paul public schools, but also a little bit more information about how we uh got to a wonderful opportunity with the help of Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to expand a food rescue program that we desperately needed. Um so we'll kind of cover a lot of ground here and the slides will be available after the presentation for um for additional help. Oh, Stacey, you're muted. >> Must have just now. There we go. Yep, you're good. >> All right. Well, let me start over then. Uh St. Paul Public Schools, that's where I am. Um a wonderful school district, one of the largest school districts in uh Minnesota. Our mission here is to inspire students to think critically, pursue their dreams, and change the world. We do have a very diverse school district. Um, so you'll see that in some of our slides, too. Um, you have over 125 dialects that are spoken throughout our schools and our community here at St. Paul Public Schools. We also have a lot of families who are struggling with food insecurity. So, all of the work that we do is not only to promote health, but our vision in our department is also to limit hunger and provide every child with hope through exceptional food. Hope is an acronym that we developed which stands for healthy options and then of course positive engagement. Engagement is a big part of what you do in child nutrition program. Okay. When I use my enter button, by the way, it's putting me on mute. So, >> is it allowing me? I think there you go. >> I got it. Perfect. Okay. All right. So, St. public schools has about 34,000 students in grades preK through 12. Uh we operate in 73 buildings throughout the city. We also support 20 um community meal sites, so parks, libraries, rec centers, um really cover, you know, quite a bit of the city here. And as I had mentioned earlier, our student population is very diverse. um speaking many different languages. A lot of our students are from households that are first generation to um the United States. Over 66% of our students um are from homes that fall below the poverty line. We serve almost 7 million meals per year and all of our programs. So that's breakfast, lunch, after school snacks, after school suppers, as well as um through our summer feeding program. We focus on scratch cooking. We try to incorporate local agriculture um into our menus and of course cultural relevant menus is a huge part is it's one of our priorities actually with our menu planning and our menu service in our district. Something that's unique with St. Paul public schools is that we have a central kitchen which is just a very large facility where we um have um rather than receiving for example cases of food we receive pallets of food and ingredients. And so we use our scratch philosophy to make, as you can see, this is Mary here making um a gravy. So we'll make sauces, gravies, soups, entre um from scratch in our kitchen. We also have a full-scale bakery here, which is where we make a lot of our our breakfast and lunch items um from scratch for our for our school programs. In order to make that something that is useful for our schools, we do of course package and and we truck that food out to our schools. We have a daily trucking system that delivers these foods that we have prepared and then packaged. So much like what you would see basically as a manufacturer. Food waste is something that all schools um are are facing that we're you know trying to answer questions on. One of the most recent studies that's come out estimated that somewhere between 30 and a little over 50% of all the food that's prepared and served in schools is in fact going into the waist stream. I personally believe that this figure might even be a little conservative. At St. Paul public schools, we studied uh breakfast and lunch. We looked at not only the food waste, but also the supply waste that was associated with those meals. And for every lunch tray that's taken, for every student takes a lunch tray, there's about u about 0.8 pounds of of waste that goes into the sorting system here. At breakfast, it's just under half of uh a pound. We know that managing waste is extremely costly. It costs a lot of money to and that the tax is extremely high on on trash, but also recycling and compost do carry a lot of um financial responsibility. Studies have shown that uh it takes maybe $9.7 million a day across the US just to handle the waste associated with these child nutrition programs. Waste can be particularly high for fruits and vegetables, but we know that taking fruits and vegetables away because they're they're a high source of waste is not the solution because they're definitely a part of a healthy diet. There are also other factors that contribute to waste in schools and that includes how much time students are given for for lunch. You've got to make it through the line um all the way to your table and then you know if you're only given 20 minutes to begin with some of our students are dealing with you know much less than 15 minutes to eat all the food that they have on their tray and then of course to sort and waste that sort and dispose of what's left after that. And for all the school nutrition uh folks that are on here, um you know, offered versus served is a requirement that we have in our programs. That means that students are allowed to uh decline some of the food that is offered to them, but there's still a requirement that they have to take a certain number of foods and a certain portion size of those foods in order for um the meal to count as a reimburseable meal, which is what our entire business model is based off of. And so those are not excuses. Those are are reasons why we have waste. I think every child nutrition program um team member is really um understanding that more than ever it's our responsibility to be responsive to the demands that we have and to be responsible for creating greener schools but also this calls for a lot of innovation because the system in of itself is not really set up for that. So this is um what led my team and I to develop a plan to basically sort of continue to focus on our number one priority. Our number one priority in our district where you know three out of five of our students are suffering from food insecurity. Number one priority is to ensure that that no one is hungry. Um you know good food is the right of every human and our students absolutely should never have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from. But right alongside that, what do we do about the waste that's that's coming from these programs? We've taken a an approach to really like raise this to the power of two where we're looking at both hunger and waste as um a single priority. So over the course of the next 10 years, we are putting measurable plans into place so that we can eliminate both hunger and waste in our schools and our communities. Food rescue has been part of the plan even before the plan was put on paper quite frankly um for decades. My predecessor as well um had partnerships with local um organizations so that we could divert some of our surplus food, right? There wasn't really um a platform for us to connect. It was individual relationships that had been developed and we were managing uh leftover food uh surplus foods with those individual partners to get our food to someone who could use it. And that took like a lot of coordination, but it also really kind of restricted or it inhibited us from giving um food that was maybe not that we didn't know about well in advance or that we couldn't store in our freezers, for example, wait for her to pick up. that meant that that food was still going into the waist stream. It was a major advancement in 2019 when Feeding America um through Second Harvest Heartland here introduce Meal Connect. If you don't know what Meal Connect is, I I like to call it it's sort of like the Craigslist for food donations. So, as um an organization who has food, you basically put a posting together so that you can say, "I've got so many pounds of ABC food. I'm looking for someone to pick it up between the hours of 9 and 11, you know, over the next couple of days." An organization who is also uh registered into that site, which means that they have also um are able to meet food safety standards. the way if that is a good fit for them, they will claim that donation and then they will work to with their crew to come and to retrieve that that food. It was a major advancement. But the problem that we did see with that um in that transition is that most of the most of the organizations that were picking up food were relying on volunteers to to help with the process. So finding the volunteers volunteers you know, having their own struggles and things that they were juggling in their life like illness or you know, appointments. Quite frankly, a lot of it was um vehicle issues. It resulted in the reality was a lot of our pickups were never retrieved. So, our team would go through all of the the work to handle the food, to package the food and the supplies that we had purchased for it, um post it, coordinate, and then the the food would never be um the food was actually picked up. And ultimately, the not only did that create a lot of extra unnecessary cost and waste, but it also had a major impact on our staff. The morale was at an all-time low. And what I heard from my team members was they didn't believe that the food was making it anywhere. Even the food that was getting picked up, there was a very low sense of trust that it was getting to someone who actually needed it. So, we knew that we had um a lot of room uh for improvement. And though we were working on it, it did not seem that um that was going to be an easy fix. So, enter the uh MPCA's opportunity to apply for a statewide prevention of wasted food and food rescue grant. That was a significant turning point um in our district. And ultimately what we did is we met as a management team to look at what we could do to not only enhance but maybe even just kind of start from scratch on the food rescue um program. We developed a proposal for a project that was just over a million and a half dollars. Um, at the time that we applied, we were actually looking at a three-year project because we needed to spend a lot of time actually rebuilding the the processes and the tools with just the way that grants work. And as you anybody who's gone through this, you know that it takes a lot of time to get things legal. We started a little bit later than we had anticipated, but we did launch the project in November of this past year. and we have a two and a half year um time frame to meet all of our objectives within this project. What we've done is we've taken the um distribution piece and we've basically absorbed that into the school district rather than leaving that on the shoulders of the nonprofit organizations. So, we're able to use the grant funding to actually hire um two full-time employees to manage the the food donations and the routes, getting the food on the trucks and getting it to um the partners organization. The rest of the funding pays for the refrigerator trucks. It pays for the fuel, the repairs, the supplies, and all the staff's time in, you know, these buildings as well as our admin team to um not only run the program, but then also to to monitor and report on the program. We had uh not been working with Cath Charities before and I u just pointed to the fact that we um we thought the best way to um tie this into our existing work was to build on our zero squared plan. So, our project, we finally refer to it as Glean for Good. Um, but we were able to develop a new partnership with Catholic Charities, um, quite frankly, even before the the grand project was fully approved. And it was such a refreshing um, relationship to to enter into because Catholic Charities has also been doing work and working connect for a number of years. um but they were very motivated and very inspired to by the by the idea of trying something new. So we I think we kind of looked out in that regard. Phase one really just included um a lot of administrative work behind the program which meant meeting with our partners. Second Harvest was there for a lot of it. um Catholic Charities and their team uh was working with our management team to really flush out, you know, what was feasible, how much food could be accepted, what days of the week work best, you know, all those sorts of um logistics. We were also building tools and training materials for our staff. When we looked at what was available in the market, we didn't really see anything that that met our needs. Um, and quite frankly, not even the the Mill Connect software um was, you know, fully functioning for what we needed. So, we ended up going to we're using Google surveys and Google Sheets for um our internal tool, which allows our school sites to on the Google Google survey. Basically, they are submitting what they have for donation. They're identifying what it is, how many pans, and how many pounds of food um are in the donation. Our two distribution workers are getting that information in their Google Sheets and they're using that to build their route for the next business day. Once our distribution members get to the school, they actually um validate what was submitted on the ticket against what's actually being donated. So they'll they'll weigh the food. They'll count the pans and they will um make any necessary corrections to the tracking um sheet that we to make sure that we have accurate data and then they take that food um over to Catholic Charities where the team there then receives the food and you'll see later kind of what they're doing with that food there. So building all of that and designing that process is what really took um the the bulk of the initial time. We had a goal. we were able to uh launch the program in a few schools before winter break. That was our preliminary goal. And then once our schools returned back after winter break, we were then able to very quickly scale up and we had districtwide expansion by the middle of January. With just a partial year of operation, we rescued 78,000 lbs of food. All of our schools are participating on a regular basis. So we don't have anybody who uh wasn't able to, you know, kind of get into the swing of things and we haven't seen anything that we have not been able to address. So through action planning and problem solving, I would say that it's actually run smoother than we had anticipated. And we do consider the fact that, you know, two new jobs being created in our community is definitely um a success. But more than that, as a director, I have to say that, you know, an outcome that really speaks very loudly to me is that staff morale is an all-time high. Staff do see where the food is going and they do know that this is helping others in the community. And so I think that is why we have 100% of our schools that are participating and um that is going as well as it is. from the management team's perspective, we had sort of an unexpected um I guess maybe there was an epiphany um that was shared amongst our our group, but rather than you know, normally the end of the year, we're planning for the the following school year. And normally it's um with food rescue especially, it's been what can we do to fix the problems? What can we do to increase the um consistency of pickups? For the first time ever, we were able to go outside of that and actually start just like a more meaningful process of setting goals. The team has uh decided that this next year's goal will actually be to reduce waste, whether it's preventing it from being waste in the first place and or to have that food rescued. But the the goal is to have food waste capped at 6% or less across the district. And then within 3 years, the goal is that the food waste will be no more than 4%. On an annual basis, this is a visual of what um the food donations look like when they're in our building. So, this gentleman in the green shirt is one of the distribution workers I was talking about, and he is using a reusable um container to get this food that's been organized, packaged, labeled over to Catholic Charities. Now, Catholic Charities will take anything from ingredients that we have because, you know, we have the Central Kitchen, so we have, you know, um a lot of ingredients there that um may be near expiration that are good and can be used. So, they'll take things like that. They also take packaged items that we have um that might be in that same category as well as food that has been prepared um for the for the meal programs that wasn't served. And their culinary team, I really have to give them a lot of credit for this. their culinary team looks at the donations and their forecast that they have and we'll decide then is this something that we want to use to recreate a new dish or is it something that we're going to serve as is. So um really happy to see that that's got so much flexibility on the organization's end. So, as I had mentioned, um just to recap, the food does make its way to the nonprofit organization where it's either repurposed or served as is. One of the things that um is notable is that in the state of Minnesota with the policy plan, the goal is to reduce our food waste um in half by 2030. So, we do feel that not only is this the right thing to do as a as a with a school program and as a you know public uh entity, but we are really proud of the fact that this does bring this food rescue plan does bring us into alignment with the need to address um food insecurity for our students as well as food insecurity for our communities and doing so in a way that's environmentally responsible. looking ahead, we are, you know, preemptively solving problems, I guess you could say, because we really want to see this continue and for this to go on um indefinitely. Any school nutrition um operator is going to tell you that funding is definitely a concern. Um there are a lot of costs to our programs and our funding um is is strict even on a good day. So, that is something that's definitely like on the front of our minds. We would love to be able to expand our program. In fact, that was like one of the um goals that we had initially that if there was another organization, another school or maybe like a long-term care facility, but someone who was on um our route towards Catholic Charities or whomever is taking our food, you know, we would really like to see the sort of like circular economy solution. So, we're hopeful that we'll be able to achieve that. Um, but that definitely has to get worked through. And you know, the other piece of that is that this all is being shared with a little bit of caution. It's um we're optimistic, but what we have learned over the years is that there are things that you maybe just don't even think about when you're getting into something like this. Having a market for your rescued food is one of the um one of the first problems that you have to solve. Just because you have food and you say it's available, that does not mean that it gets to someone who is actually going to consume the food. You really have to have a partner who's um you know running a smooth operation, who is engaged with their community, who has, you know, regular um who has regular consumers and is willing to to work with you. um schools just have a large volume of food compared to, for example, if you're a restaurant that was trying to um participate in a food rest program. Not that that's not a good thing, but foods are are a little bit more unique um from schools because we have such large large volumes. So, finding the right partner and the right market for your food is definitely something that has to be top consideration. And likewise um the partnership itself um because there will be problems that you'll have to solve once you get started. So as long as you have somebody who's motivated and invested with you that's going to make your life um a lot easier. I'm at the end of my slides. Um there is some additional information if anyone wanted to look at the plan or the progress reports that we have. They're available um on our website. And then also a couple of articles that have been published specifically about Glean for good and the work that we're able to do um thanks to the support of again MPCA, Second Harvest, and Catholic Charities. Okay. Um so I think I will stop sharing my screen now and I'll let you have that back. Awesome. Thank you so much, Stacey. I mean it's just such an innovative plan and if anyone you know there's I mean I share these slides as we've mentioned several times in this workshop. Um there's links in the presentations um I would highly encourage you to go check out um St. Paul public schools uh zero hunger and zero waste plan. It's a super innovative approach and just to know that your district has taken basically the food donation process inhouse for transport and pickup is so innovative and cool. So any questions for her? Give it a few seconds either unmute or in the chat and you'll have her contact information to reach out to to learn more as well. All right, thanks so much CeCe. Thanks for being here. >> I really appreciate it. That was I I always learn a ton from these presentations, too. So, I'm going to just briefly just kind of reiterate some of what Cece's presentation focus was. I know we're short on time, so I'm going to whip through these quick, but um just a few wasted food prevention highlights from the past several years of work in Dakota County Schools. Um you know, wasted food, it's more than just about food. It's about resources. is our food system uses enormous resources including crop land, freshwater, fertilizers, pest control, labor, energy to transport food, regulate temperature, and when we don't eat the food, all of those resources are for nothing. Um, so it costs uh an estimated cost of 218 billion disposing uneaten food annually. um and 10% of our total US energy budget and 25% of our freshwater supplies to grow food that's not eaten. So that's 40% of all food in the US. So an average of 400 pounds of food per person per year. So when you put it into that perspective of pizza, basically you sliced off a third of it and dumped it in the trash every time. Um, so we know it's all of those resources too that went into making those, you know, meals that were never eaten. And that's what that looks like. Um, I'm kind of whipping through this, but it would basically be enough food to fill a 40 ton tractor trailer every 20 seconds. Um, you know, and if the all the food we wasted came from one farm, that farm would be 3/4 the size of California. So that's a that's a lot of food waste and that's a situation in our country. So even if we compost our food, which is better than it ending up in the landfill, all the resources used to produce it are still wasted. So with so much food waste, there should be no hunger, right? But that's not the case. We know one in seven Americans live in a food insecure household. So that's why programs like Stacy's related to food donation are so important. Um, and on our hierarchy, we can see, you know, the it prioritizes actions to prevent divert wasted food. So the top two levels are preventing and diverting wasted food through source reduction like inventorying supplies or adjusting portions and then donation to feed hungry people. And where do we see composting on this list? It's not until the fifth tier. So composting has numerous benefits for improving soils and water quality and uh certainly for the inedible parts of food like a banana peel. Um, but there are other, you know, outlets for edible food that are much much better. So, you know, I'm I don't have time to go through all of this, but these slides will be shared as mentioned. Um, we have a lot of different strategies, and I'll share a link to our web page where you can find most of this info. Strategies to prevent wasted food that we've tried and piloted and implemented in Dakota County Schools. Um, involving students in a tray audit to measure the amount of food waste generated. Um, you know, and students can get involved auditing and interviewing, um, which can help leadership, you know, take opportunities to adjust potentially, um, their meals and make sure more food gets eaten. Food share tables, um, designated areas for students to place uneaten, unopened food or beverages. They've chosen not to eat or drink. These are approved by the Minnesota Department of Health, USDA, as long as rules are followed. Um, and then they can either be redistributed to students, served or claimed for reimbursement during another meal, or donated depending on your school or district policy. Um, and then another strategy, you know, offering appropriately sized servings. Um, the USDA's National School Lunch Program has some portion size requirements to receive um, reimbursements for meals, but some entree portions can be cut and still fall under these requirements. Um, so that might look different in elementary versus high school. Elementary students typically can select their meal choice for the day also in the morning. Um, so you know, several students schools we were working with allowed younger students to request half-sized portions in their morning selection. However, it wasn't standardized across all classrooms and maybe offered to older students. So after implementing that for all grades in an elementary school and offering those half-sized portions, um they were able to see a 38% decrease in food waste. So that's pretty cool. Slicing, you know, apples, also fruit, hard to harder to eat items, um has resulted in a 73% increase in the number of students who ate more than half of their apple. So a lot of stuff. And then I saw a question earlier from Dan on this about the meal requirements. Maybe we got to it. Um but I just wanted to point out um basically for you know our our school lunch requirements the USDA has clarified it's not required to take a milk if other meal requirements are met. You have to take a half cup of a fruit or vegetable. Um but basically it's offered. So it's not required to be taken. Um but in the offer versus serve uh meal service requirement um you know it a lot of times students and staff are confused or um things have changed over the years about reimburseable meal requirements. So it is no longer required students take a milk. So educating students on that um is important to make sure that we don't end up with a bunch of unopened milk cartons at the end of the line. And then providing access to water, scheduling recess or exercise before lunch. These are all ways, you know, reminding students how much time they have left in the lunch period. Several schools have implemented, dimming the lights, um requesting them to focus on eating the last 5 minutes um with visual different visual cues or um a audio cues. Um, time to eat reminders can be helpful as well as flavor stations to allow students to customize their meals as well as bringing attention to, you know, food, how much food waste or milk waste a school has. So, this was originally kicked off by Mark Glendy, um, a custodian in, uh, district 191 here in Dakota County. Um, but I'm happy to share more about, you know, their LA one last sip campaigns and different things they've done that other schools have modeled since. So, uh, I know Stacy mentioned Meal Connect. That is Meal Connect's contact if you're interested in looking into that. You don't have a way currently to bring it inhouse like St. Paul Public Schools has done. Um, as well as our preventing food waste um, web page. So, I will share that um, link out. that'll be linked on this slide so you can kind of follow up with me if you're interested in learning more. So if we don't have any questions, I am going to move on but I will stop sharing so I can actually see the chat. I think okay Rachel's covering that. Okay, perfect. Thanks everyone. So, we're going to have Rachel Kennedy, um, my colleague here, um, be our next presenter. U, so, as she gets her slides pulled up, I'll introduce her. Rachel's an environmental specialist with a BS in environmental public health and an MS in communications. She has experience communicating a variety of topics like POS contamination, regulatory information related to petroleum storage tanks and diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Her work center's approachable and inclusive communication strategies to help inform behavior change. And currently she leads all communication efforts within our unit, including our involvement in the Metroide Recycling Exist campaign. So take it away, Rachel. >> Hi again, everyone. Um hopefully this is a less tech buggy presentation that I have for you. But um like Ally said, my name is Rachel and I am just going to be introducing uh the recycling exists campaign with you. >> People say we're made up. Tall tales myths. Think what you want about us, but we can all be certain of this. Recycling is real and it works. But what happens to your recycling once it leaves your home? Recycled glass is sorted in St. Paul. Then the clear glass is made into bottles for drinks, pickles, salad dressing, and more in Shakape. At other facilities, plastic bottles get made into new plastic bottles. Recycling exists. Learn the real story behind recycling. All right. So, um maybe you are wondering what sparked this campaign. Quite a few things. So, um it seems like every year there's some new sensational story about how plastic recycling is a myth, recycling isn't real, and this person put a tracker in this thing and it ended up going somewhere it shouldn't have. And um that makes uh mine and Alli's job kind of difficult, right? because well look what we are up against. Um ultimately in the Twin Cities there was this billboard that had surfaced um that just straight up said plastic recycling is a myth. And so um the counties got together in the Twin Cities metro area to try to find some messaging to combat this. So um at its inception, Carver County, Dakota County, Henipin County, Ramsey County, Scott County, and Washington County um all came together to um create uh some messaging. Um each uh county funded the campaign according to its uh proportional to its population size. Um we want know we knew we wanted to develop some sort of landing website that people could go to some fun videos, social media posts um and some billboards um to start with the goal to increase confidence in the Twin Cities metro area recycling systems um and educate residents on where your recycling goes. So we picked the messaging recycling exists because it was a direct opposition to the existing body of recycling skepticism. Uh it was positively framed. So instead of reinforcing a negative behavior um like myth busting for example, we said let's just say recycling exists. Two words, super simple for people to um for for it to stay, you know, in your head. Um, we wanted to talk about the different uh recyclable categories, the materials, and then specific items. Um, each county has their own uh lists of um categories and and ways that they um talk about the recyclable materials. Um, and so all of our content needed to align together. Um, and so I'm just going to show some examples here. Um, these are all the different recycling uh handouts that um the different counties have. So, as you can see, they're all pretty similar, but they, you know, are different. So, it took some negotiation. Um, happy to report that um I uh really rally hard for Dakota County's messaging. So, when you look at the recycling exist content, you'll notice it's very similar to what we um tell you guys all the time to tell your students and staff at your schools. Um, so here's just an example of a part of the website. Um, we have all of these categories. Um, and then when you hover over the image, it will give you a list of uh common items within that category. We also have um a link that goes directly back to the county's website. Um, so no matter where you are, um, coming to recycling exists, you can find your county if you live in the, um, if you live in one of these six counties. Um, that being said, In Noa County just joined in, um, so that wasn't on this updated slide, but they're officially on board now. Um, another thing we wanted to reinforce is the amazing recycling systems that, uh, exist in Minnesota, um, and in for the Twin Cities. So often when you see these sensationalized pieces that tell you recycling isn't real, it doesn't work, you know, etc. Um those are stories that are missing a lot of regional context. Um so you you know California's recycling system is going to be different than our recycling system and um Twin Cities recycling system is different than greater Minnesota's recycling system. So you can really break it. it can really be it can really differ, you know, beyond um you know, it's not just statewide. It can really differ just like down to regions. So, as residents um or staff working in Dakota County or in the Twin Cities metro area, um we just want to reinforce that the recycling markets here are fantastic. And um it's it's got to be I mean it's like above 90% of your recyclables when they're recycled in the Twin Cities stay in Minnesota. If they don't stay in Minnesota, they go to maybe Wisconsin or they stay in the Midwest and then a very very tiny portion is sent to different states. Um, so we really wanted to reinforce that by providing um folks with the um actual markets and the places that examples of places these recyclables go, what they turn into, and then also some numbers as well. So, um, I have time. I think we're kind of caught up now. So, I'm just going to go through our landing page, www.recyclingexist.com. Here is, um, everything that we have here. Um, it's not a fairy tale. You know, recycling exists. What you put in your recycling cart in the Twin Cities gets recycled. Here are all of these um items that can be recycled. And when you hover over each one, it will give you examples of those things. Where does our recycling go? So, let's start with paper and cardboard. Um, Twin Cities recycled um almost half a million tons of mixed paper in 2023. Um, you can sift through all of these and they are always gonna There we go. All right. For some reason, that one's buggy. But, as you can see, you can flip through all of these and it'll tell you where things go. So, paper and cardboard um go to paper mills like Liberty Liberty paper. um they make a pulp which is flattened and then turned into corrugated sheets to become new new boxes um and other cardboard packaging. Cartons um sent to Wisconsin um to be made into new paper products. Metal cans um are sent to uh scrap companies um and then they are turned into um products like big metal beams parts for cars and appliances. um that our specific example is Miller scrap and disposal in Winona. Um glass bottles and jars um like the video said, sent to St. Paul made into new glass bottles and jars. And then plastic bottles, containers, and jugs. Um so plastics, uh that's probably the, you know, the trickiest messaging um just because there are a lot of plastics that are not able to be recycled in our system. Um that doesn't mean that they will never be able to be recycled. That just means that we don't have a economic market that makes sense to, you know, build the technology and staff the people to sort and these materials and get them recycled. But you can feel very confident that there are some really, you know, lowhanging fruit recyclables that are so so so common that can be recycled. And those are those plastic bottles, containers, and jugs that um we've I'm sure that you've all seen on our recycling flyers and what Alli has shared with you before. Um anyway, there's a company in Paysville that will take milk jugs, detergent bottles, and they'll turn them into um outdoor furniture that you can buy um that's made from recycled products. So, that's really awesome. Um, again, here's the spot uh that uh lets you click on whatever county you're in. Um, and it'll take you directly to the residential um page for recycling that county. Um, we've got the videos posted on here. So, I encourage you to check out this website, look at all the videos. We have them for um every material um on here. We also have videos available in Spanish as well. Um why does it matter? So, the last thing that we wanted to include in here is just that it's to tie it all in is why is it important to recycle? Um, and one, it's really good for the environment. It takes way less energy to make something from something that already exists than it does to source all the new resources to create something new. Um, and then it also can affect the economy. So, it adds to about almost 80,000 jobs in Minnesota each year. Um and it pays these page these jobs pay almost um eight billion in wages and they add nearly 24 billion to uh Minnesota's economy. Um we also have uh you can go to energy. So like I said it takes less energy to recycle a product than to create a new one. Um find out more. This will take you to the Minnesota Pollution Control AY's web page. So I kind of just flew through that. Um but again just wanted to reinforce um you know the the recycling markets in the Twin Cities and you can feel confident in it and you can tell people who tell you that it's not real. You can say well actually recycling exists and let me show you some really cool um things that can you know really justify that point. Um so this campaign launched in December of 2023. We've had over 35,000 clicks to the website and um this and these ads have shown up um over 44 million times um throughout the Twin Cities which is really great. Um we have some really nice assets like social media posts, videos, there are some posters and activity booklets that um we are currently working with the ad agency to uh tweak to meet Dakota County's um messaging and standards. um and we'd like to share them with you. So, um in these next steps, um the campaign is pretty established at this point. So, all the counties are we're all working together, but we're continuing to add our own funds in it to advertise it in the way that makes sense for our residents. Um so, we're planning the round three right now. Um like I said, Anoka Co, Anoka County joined the team. So, now we've got all the Twin Cities, metro area counties on board, which is really awesome. um this took a lot of time and money to um to create this campaign and so you could trust me when I tell you that recycling exists. We would not have spent the time and money and effort on something if it was you know a lie, right? So um that's really exciting. And then also um we want to create some more assets for our audiences like schools. So um if you can see recycling exists succeeding in your school, I would love to know. I would love to know what kinds of materials would work for your schools. Um if you need posters, if you need, you know, flyers, something else. Um I would love to hear that um as we move into our next uh our next round of advertising. So if there are any questions, um you can uh ask me them right now. Otherwise, please feel free to email me or email Ally. She'll direct those questions to me. Um, and like I said, if there's a material that you think, "Wow, I would really like to have that in my school, um, let's connect and see what we can um, get made for your school and then it can be applicable to other schools." Awesome. Thank you, Rachel. That was great. Any questions for Rachel? I also realized if we want to launch our last poll, we could >> gohead your hand up. >> Lori, are you able to unmute and ask your question or maybe it was accident? All right, >> great. >> Perfect everyone. I'll pass it back to you, Ally. >> Thanks, Rachel. And then, um, for our last poll, uh, the poll is just, which of those statements, I mean, now Rachel has ease our concerns. Um, we know that these things aren't true, but, um, these are things that I hear in schools all the time. um still perpetuating. So, if you're able to help um you know, quell these rumors and remind people that recycling exists, recycling is real, these are all false statements. So, we're curious which ones you've heard, if any. Be great if you're not hearing these, but these are all false. Haulers send recycling to landfills. Not true. Recyclables are sorted out of the trash at the landfill. That is not true. And we already recycle everything we can. And that is also not true. And if you have others, feel free to throw them in the chat. >> Yes, good point to bolster that. Every single statement on here is false. Is not true. >> Yeah, it looks like some people are hearing recyclables are sorted out of the trash as well as it looks like a couple other ones. All of them. Britney says, "Yep. Okay, I see um a question about cans. So um it depends on the type of can. So, um, like I mentioned, the steel cans, um, those are like your cans that like beans come in or soup cans, those are sent to scrap facilities, um, that, uh, can sell the, then they sell the material off to companies that turn them into parts for cars, appliances, beams. Um, and then, um, aluminum cans. Um that's like the from at least from what I know because the recycling world is always changing, technology is always evolving or always evolving. But um aluminum cans um that's like the one market that there's a lot of markets down south um that turn your aluminum cans into brand new aluminum cans. Chances are if you drink pop um and uh you're drinking it out of a metal can, chances are that that has been recycled over and over and over again. Um, and that is uh been recycled. So, um, Jolie, uh, things do get recycled. Um, unless that's a false statement that you've heard. Um, >> I was thinking I was thinking that, too. >> I know. I was like, wait a minute. >> I'm hoping, >> but yeah, I mean, this is this should be very um uh um reassuring to you as you are pushing recycling messaging in your schools that it is worth it. It is it is, you know, it's working in the Twin Cities. we have great markets and um yeah, we're just happy to have you on board to um help us boost confidence in other people because you have connections that you know we don't have and um yeah. >> Yep. Totally. Thank you, Rachel. And yeah, hopefully that's the last time we have to ever hear any of those statements. Um I'm sure it's not the last time, but just doing our best to um get the truth about recycling out there. So, I wanted to just touch base. I'm not going to have time to dive into all of these in depth, but um what goes where and why should we care, I think, is a perpetual question. Um so, learning about where stuff comes from, how recycling works, what's recyclable, what needs to stay out. Um everything we use comes from the earth. You know, natural resources, trees, water, minerals, land go into making our our things. And it takes a lot of energy, as Rachel mentioned, to get those products to us. um when they're coming from those original sources to make them into something we can use. So glass a lot of times we don't think about materials in this way. What are what is glass made of? It's made of silica sand which is you know special silica sand quartz rocks worn down into small pieces over time through the work of water and wind. So we have to mine we have to cut down trees. We have to get it and burn it at a high temperature to make that glass using a lot of energy. And glass like aluminum can be recycled forever as long as we keep recycling it. So, it takes way less energy to make new glass bottles from old glass bottles and avoids all that digging. Paper. I'm I'm hoping we all know where paper comes from. This is probably the one we're most familiar with. Obviously, trees. So, trees we know um give off oxygen we need to breathe. to keep our soils healthy, reduce pollution. Um, in order to get the trees, we have to build roads to cut them down, chop them up. And paper can be recycled over and over until the strands get too short. Then they get made into something like a napkin that I just I usually tell students, napkins are tired when they get wet and they fall apart. So eventually, you know, you can only recycle paper so many times till it gets made into something else that is not recyclable. Um, but when we recycle, we can make new paper without cutting down trees every time. Um, the next item, plastic. Where do we get plastic? Um, it comes from oil and natural gas. These things are found deep underground, formed millions of years ago from the remains of plants and animals. We have to use giant drilling machines, transport them to refinery to be made into oil. And we know plastic can only only be recycled a couple times before it gets made into something that's not recyclable. So unlike other materials too, plastic never breaks down completely. Meaning every piece of plastic that's ever been made is still present on Earth. They break down into tiny pieces we can't see eventually called microlastics, which I think we've heard in the last couple years can get into our soil, into our water, our food, and then our bodies. So, that can be a real issue. Um, aluminum, our last material, aluminum is made from boxite ore. Um, it's a rock. It's found deep underground, usually in tropical areas. So, this often involves mining in rainforest and diverse environmental areas. So, we have to get in there, we have to get the rock out, and then we have to melt it at high temperatures. where an aluminum can once it's been created, it can be a new aluminum can back on the shelf in 60 days and it can be recycled an infinite number of times. So I tell students forever. So like why would we throw away something so valuable when we have to go through all this to get another one? So it's it's basically magic if we put it in the recycling bin. We don't have time for this video. You can watch it on your own later, but basically as Rachel said, you know, recycling saves energy. It's, you know, creating less pollution, keeps things out of our landfill. We have two landfills here in Dakota County. One in Burnsville, one in Verrove Heights for, you know, things that are coming from our homes and schools. We have a few other construction demolition landfills, but um where our trash goes in Dakota County, a majority of it goes to the landfill. So, um that is not being sorted out. uh once the recyclables are in the trash, it's going there. So, we need to do our best to kind of keep it at in the recycling. And then also, we know recycling that water bottle is great, but as we've been talking about today, are there ways to reduce it so that we don't need to use it in the first place? Because we know, you know, recycling everything um without stopping to think what we can do instead, we're still using energy to make new products. And unless it's aluminum or glass, it can't be recycled forever. So there has to be some some movement towards waste reduction because a lot of these resources are not going to be around forever. Um our waste hierarchy, I know we've seen this several times, but I just want to reiterate our Rs are in this order for a reason. Waste reduction at the top. That's where we want to focus. Um I know in the past we've focused predominantly on recycling. That's where our requirements are. It's still very important. Um, but the best way to think about waste is to reduce first then reuse and recycle as a last resort and then you get into composting and landfill at the bottom. So just thinking about waste in that way instead of always jumping to well but we can recycle it, you know, is a mindset paradigm shift. So, um, in Dakota County, uh, like I mentioned, our our trash from schools is going to the landfill. On average, the average person per day makes around five 4.4 pounds of waste, but it's similar to a 5 lb bag of flour if you have one in your pantry. You can feel what that feels like. So, um, recycling and trash don't just go away. It's not this magical place. Trash goes to the landfill. Um, and recycling goes to the recycling facility. It is getting recycled. It's against the law for haulers to take your separated recycling and dispose of it as trash. So, it will go to a sorting facility where people and machines try to pick out um the items to separate them into different categories and then they're squished into big cubes called bales and sent to kind of the end markets where they'll be made into new products. So, just a quick little, hey, we're picking up a cart. I know this is a home, but imagine a dumpster at school. Same concept. Then it goes to the recycling facility. We have around eight recycling facilities in the metro area. Um, single sort, so all our recyclables can go together, bottles, cans, paper, and then it's there that it's sorted out. So, this is a video you can watch later. Um, that's really useful, I think, to see the recycling process. It's from Eureka um recycling facility in St. Paul. And at the recycling facility, we call a MURF material recovery facility. Um it's required um you know, it's a myth that they go to the same place as the trash. As I mentioned, it's illegal in Minnesota for recycling to be brought anywhere other than a sorting facility. And um recycling facilities have to ensure at least 85% of the material is recycled. Um, so they have an incentive too to do education, you know, of their customers and make sure they're meeting that threshold. Um, they can only have up to 15% residual or, you know, contamination. And then trash is also taxed at 17%. Um, recycling hauling is not. So there's a financial incentive too for schools to uh either reduce your trash dumpster size or number of pickups uh to try to decrease um that cost. And obviously the whole point of recycling is making it into new things. Eventually it might get into made into something it can't be recycled. Um but waste reduction is better. Even though recycling's great, that's where we can start to think about waste reduction as well. Um recycling facilities have to stop machines at least 2 hours every day to cut plastic bags off the sorting line. So me remember when you put things into the recycling at at school, this will be more so for custodial staff, but even at home, it can't be bagged in plastic bags. It has to be loose. And I know we've done a previous presentation on that for bag lists. If you need resources on kind of strategies to help with that, I'm happy to help. Um, but yeah, not when it's going in hauler provided carts or dumpsters since 2021 here in our county. Um, and you know, you can obviously bag things inside the school, but make sure it's emptied out when you get to the recycling cart or dumpster and put the bags in the trash once they're too dirty to reuse. So, this is our simple list um to know what can and can't be recycled. Um, we have a standardized list of recyclables in Dakota County um which help with, you know, making sure we're all saying the same things. haulers, um, businesses, schools, you know, we all are looking at the same designated list which is in our requirements. Um, so we're not getting a bunch of yes, no, may it's yes and nos um that we can focus on. So I don't have time to go in depth in this, but these are kind of our main paper examples. We don't want shredded paper, plates and cups, napkins and tissues. Um, shredded paper we featured last year, as you can imagine, turns into confetti. But if you can use a confidential paper service, that's great. Um, but focus on the paper that can be recycled. Um, aluminum cans are great for recycling as mentioned. Um, but there's some things that cannot be recycled. As well as glass, bottles and jars. Always keep your caps on, lids on. Um, and make sure it's beverage or food glass. If it's something else, you might have to look at our recycling guide to figure out if it can go in or where it should be disposed of. Cartons very highly recyclable um not in the organics in the recycling. They are lined with plastic but they can be recycled. So caps if you have one should stay on and these should be emptied and free of food and liquids. And then plastics. I know we talk about numbers. Um I always think I love recycling like the sign language I love you symbol. one, twos, and fives are recyclable. So, um, looking at that, but also remembering never plastic bags, never black plastic, and styrofoam is a number six, but if for some reason you see a 125 on anything that's in those categories, um, that's an exception. So, we want um, kind of our standard recyclables that are listed here. And I already touched base on that. the resin codes on the right, the numbers in the triangles don't mean something's recyclable. It just means it's made from that type of plastic. So, we're really trying that new kind of symbol or kind of messaging, I guess you would call it on the left is where a lot of companies are going for a labeling system so that it's less confusing so that we can get to this. I mean, we have a lot of minutia. I know there's a lot of questions all the time of well what about this onesie twoosie item that's maybe not on this list and that's okay feel free to ask me email check out our online recycling guide where it's a directory you can search but these are the things we know a lot of these things are still not ending up in the recycling so let's focus here get this down well and then we can focus on maybe some of the more confusing items but we don't want to lose people by getting overwhelmed and not focusing on the basics, which is this list. Bottles, cans, paper, cartons, you know, it's not rocket science. We can do it. Um, and we're doing it. So, yeah, great job in your schools. um emptying liquids, no food, keeping caps and lids on, flattening boxes, and then these are kind of some of our top nos that I touched on most of them already, but we don't want to be wish cycling, which is putting something in the recycling, hoping it can be recycled, um keeping these things out of the recycling for various reasons. And then when you're in your classroom or at your school, making sure containers are paired together. That's actually required that wherever there's a trash indoors or outdoors, there's a recycling within 10 ft. And even closer than within 10 ft is what I'd recommend, right next to each other cuz human nature is to go whichever one's closest with everything. But if they're paired, my tendency is to sort and so is most people's. So, you're going to get people to sort if they are paired. Um, giving them the opportunity always. And then, uh, labels. We offer these for free, which I'll dive into in a second, but that is also required. And thanks for helping us recycle, right? I'm going to share quickly jumping into here my resources presentation. I know I'm down to couple minutes. That's why I said 11:35, right? I knew I would I knew we'd be, you know, having way too much info. So anyway, these are our resources. We go through these every year. So, if you've been here at a workshop in the past, we have a few new ones. Um, but for the most part, you know, these are still always offered to you and most of them are free. So, we have free labels, posters, activity guides. We have online order form on our website. You can request those. School training resources. All schools in Dakota County are required to provide standardized recycling education at least once a year to all staff and students. That's a newer requirement that a lot of schools might not be aware of. and we're, you know, still getting the word out about and creating resources for, but there's some resources on our web page now, um, for you to access. Uh, we have grants. Um, we know nearly 80% of school waste is recyclable or compostable. We want to provide assistance to help schools reduce waste and recycle more. So grants are available to public and private schools in Dakota County up to $10,000 for our large project grants. And then we have many grants that are more self-sufficient that are up to $1,000. Um but feel free to reach out to me. Um any initiative that you would have an idea to reduce waste and improve recycling or your organics program um would be considered. So even if it's not in our guidelines, these are some examples of things we've done, but we've done a lot of other things outside of this list, too. So, please reach out. Um, cafeteria and stadium banners for free. Um, if you need these, please request them to me. Um, we've done several different versions over the years. We've worked with several stadiums in the past couple years, too. So, providing those. And then we have free performances and field trip busing. So, um, Dakota County provides waste education to schools to enhance student and staff recycling knowledge. So you can request a free performance or field trip. The performances are focused on K through three. Field trip busing um to visit a recycling facility, landfill or compost site. Um is focused on grade four but eligible to student green teams grade five and above including middle school and high school. Um as well as school staff. So, come check out a facility to kind of show people what where our materials end up, that recycling is not a myth. Um, and then our new compost delivery form we have now available year round on our website. These are all links you can go click on. Um, but basically you can request free compost delivery to your school and we used to only offer it in the spring and now we have it available for a school to request once per school year at any time that works for you and your school best. So, that's exciting. We have education kits and event containers. Feel free to check out our web page if you need to borrow those. We provided vape disposal kits several years ago. I know we featured this at the workshop in the past, but vape devices are regulated hazardous waste. They can't go in the trash or recycling. So, we provided 49 vape disposal kits for free to public secondary schools and two non-public schools. If others are interested, feel feel free to reach out. Um but new this year, we actually um partnered with tobaccof free alliance and a public health department um on kind of engaging Dakota County high school student leaders on a pilot project to have high school students um engage in a safe vape waste disposal event at their schools. Um so even though these materials are banned on school grounds, they were able to um kind of turn them in and um it was kind of in partnership with the cessation effort and education on um how to stop vaping um on that side too. So partnering on new initiatives all the time. We had three events with 40 students participating and 20 vape 14 vapes um that were collected or turned in. And then we have a graduation yard sign collection available right now at our Western Service Center. Sent an email out to all the high school principles on that. But if you have any of those or know of students that have those, it's available through August 15th. And then this is our recycling guide I've referenced. You can go on our website, search any item, and then it'll help you kind of figure out where it should go. and our e-news. If you're not already on it, you can click here and get signed up. We send about four a year on different topics advertising our workshop and other initiatives, webinars, exciting articles of things schools are doing throughout the year. And then here's our main web page. Um, so you're able to find all this information. And we did it. Yay, we made it. So, um, just a reminder, um, don't make our sloth work too hard. Let's keep our recycling paired next to every trash container. Um I'm going to send a survey out just like every year um this week to get your feedback and hopefully improve future workshops. This is our first year on teams. Um so yeah, getting your feedback and then if you'd like CU credits, feel free to email me. My email is right here on the screen. Um and I can send out those to you that certificate. Um and our recording again will be posted on our web page. I'll send a notification email out. um when that is available. So, thanks again. I'll stay on for any questions anyone has, but I really appreciate everyone's time today and feel free to reach out anytime with additional questions. Thanks for being here.