Brewster Schools Showcase Composting Program

BREWSTER – Brewster schools are committed to education, even outside the classroom. 

For students in second grade and beyond, lunchtime serves as a reminder of sustainable practices with their organics collection program. 

The idea behind the program is to sort food waste into three main categories: liquids, partially eaten food and nonrecyclable materials such as plastics. Maintenance staff made custom tables with separate bins for the cafeterias, so students could practice the sorting process. Once the buckets are filled, they are dumped into a trash barrel, which is then picked up weekly by Black Earth Compost, a local composting company which facilitates the composting process and returns the finished product to backyards, farms and community gardens. 

The program started in 2023 as the brainchild of the Brewster waste reduction and recycling committee. Meg Morris, current chair, knew that starting these practices in schools would help prepare kids for a future of sustainability and recycling. 

Around 20 years ago, the schools composted by sending their food waste to a local pig farm. When the farm went out of business, the schools returned to a traditional trash model.

“When I found this out, I worked with a teacher at the Eddy School and said, ‘would you be willing to try this again?” Morris said. “She said, ‘Absolutely!” 

Eddy Elementary School was the first to adopt the program. It is now a regular practice for Stony Brook Elementary’s second graders, Eddy Elementary School and the rest of the Nauset district. 

At the beginning of the program, Morris went to each school to present the idea of waste reduction and the correct steps to take. She visits the schools regularly to check in and refresh the memories of the students. 

For Eddy Elementary Principal Steven Guditus, it was a community effort. Patty Taylor, the cafeteria manager, and her husband crafted their custom table for the students. Members of the community helped supervise lunches in the beginning to make sure kids knew the correct process. The parent teacher organization (PTO) funded the compost pickup for the first year of the program. 

Why is the program a priority?

“For kids to know the importance of how they can impact the world in a really small minor way,” Guditus said. “For two meals a day when they are at school, we can impact the world, make it a greener place and it doesn’t take a lot of effort.” 

He went on to say that students are learning a tool that they can use for the rest of their lives. 

In the two years since the program began, only one bin has been rejected by Black Earth. Bins are rejected if too much non-organic matter is found. 

The program has been deemed a success by school staff. Nauset Regional Middle School’s Grade Seven Counselor Eric Saum recognized Caleb Cox, a sixth grader who has shown a deep passion for the program.

Cox’s first experience with recycling was in elementary school. 

“He helps empty buckets every single day and he will even occasionally don a glove and pick food out of the trash to compost. At this age, that is over and above,” Saum said. “He mostly helped with recycling and I can tell it is important to him because he was the one who really pushed us to start a recycling program this year - so we soft launched that in January of 2025!”

On average, Saum estimated that the middle school is composting between 25-50 pounds of food waste per day, around 8,000 pounds per year. He also says there are about three to four fewer bags of trash leaving the lunchroom per week. 

 The waste reduction and recycling commission is now focused on working with local resorts and apartment complexes to see if there are opportunities to reduce landfill trash. Morris says they are also looking into compostable receptacles for foods during school lunches to try and eliminate the amount of plastic.