by Eileen Oldfield, Staff Writer
Half a peanut butter sandwich, apple cores, banana peels, moldy rolls — it’s just trash, except to students in Timothy Zavacki’s industrial technology class at Hillsborough High School.
For them, last night’s leftovers are the beginning of nutrient-loaded soil made in a composter the teacher built last year.
”This is a technology course, and the whole thing fits in with the deal of bio-technology,” Mr. Zavacki said. “The idea (behind bio-technology) is you use organisms to help humans. We’re using their waste (the insects in the composter) to create nutrient rich soil.”
Mr. Zavacki built the composter in 2007, and installed it at the school that year. Created out of an old shipping crate and measuring 4-by-4-feet and 8-feet long, Mr. Zavacki’s classes began filling the machine with food scraps and other organic waste, including leaves and sawdust. Assigned as homework for the class, Mr. Zavacki asked students to bring paper bags containing the food scraps to the school; the paper bags can be tossed in the composter as extra compost.
The material had several restrictions, however — it could not include leftover meat or seafood, dairy products, bones, or pet waste, Mr. Zavacki said, meaning most of the composted food includes vegetables, grains or organic waste.
”You name it, if it’s a vegetable, you can put it in,” said Mr. Zavacki, who used scraps from the school’s food classes and sawdust from his own classes in the composter also.
The leftovers spent a year in the composter before Mr. Zavacki’s classes used it to landscape the area outside the high school’s preschool classroom last month. Since the landscaping project occurred this year, Mr. Zavacki said the students working on the landscaping project were new to the course, and did not take it the year he created the composter.
Despite missing the composter’s inception, Mr. Zavacki said the students’ enthusiasm didn’t suffer.
”The kids did it all; I pretty much just supervised,” Mr. Zavacki said. “I told them they had to do it all.”
The landscaping project included digging up the old soil, getting the rocks out of it, mixing it with the nutrient-rich compost, and planting flowers in the fortified soil.
The class incorporates various subjects into its curriculum, including math, science, and social studies, Mr. Zavacki said. The composting and landscaping project allowed the class to focus on the science and math aspects of the project, as well as highlighting one of Mr. Zavacki’s passions: recycling.
”One of the reasons was, of course, was ‘going green,’” Mr. Zavacki said. It’s also another way of pushing recycling for food materials. Instead of throwing it away, how about recycling it to help the planet?”
