The Arrowhead Earth Club has implemented composting within the school. 

The initiative was started by Cassie Kuenn, a senior at Arrowhead and Vice President of Earth Club, who says she “saw the immense amount of food going to waste each day and decided to do something about it.  Due to covid protocol, every kid getting a hot lunch was required to have a fruit and a vegetable.  Many of these items went to waste every day and ended up in the garbage.”

According to the Arrowhead website, “Arrowhead Earth Club is a fun extracurricular focused on promoting environmental awareness. Earth Club is student-led and has meetings once per month. We also have events scheduled throughout the school year.” 

Along with their fundraisers and Earth-healthy activities they also host a podcast. According to their podcast homepage they “release stories, messages and tips on protecting our Earth.” 

Kuenn says her process for starting the composting initiative “started with my Global Capstone class.  I wanted to help reach the UN’s sustainable development goal for sustainable cities and communities, and I thought bringing composting to Arrowhead would be a good start.”

The Arrowhead website defines the global capstone as “support[ing] students who are interested in preparing themselves for their roles as global citizens in an ever-changing global society. This experience aims to help students become globally competent by practicing these skills across a variety of subject areas.”

According to the United states Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) compostable items include “fruits and vegetables, eggshells, coffee grounds and filters, tea bags, nut shells, shredded newspaper, cardboard, paper, yard trimmings, grass clippings, houseplants, hay and straw, leaves, sawdust, wood chips, cotton and wool Rags, hair and fur, fireplace ashes.”

Kuenn says, “I wrote a letter of advocacy and presented an awareness campaign to a group of my peers about the benefits of composting.  I contacted Brew City Compost after a presentation of theirs that I watched.  We established a partnership that we have cemented throughout the end of the 2022 school year and the 2022-2023 school year.”

According to Brewcity Compost, their mission is to “be a part of the change, the agricultural wave of regeneration. We believe that soil regeneration, no matter what the scale, will help to divert waste from landfills, sequester carbon and revitalize the health of our bodies and ecosystem.” Currently they only accept “raw fruits and vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, coffee filters and coffee,” for their composting services.

Even though Kuenn is graduating at the end of the 2021-2022 school year, she says “through my leadership in Arrowhead’s Earth Club, I have set up a composting committee that will keep the program running after I graduate at the end of this year.”

Payton Jaronsinski a senior at Arrowhead, who bee-keeps and advocates for environmental conservation. She says, “I think that a compost system would be very beneficial to cut down food waste and to help save the environment one bee, sorry I meant apple, at a time!”

Kuenn says, “In the next year, the Earth Club Committee and I have plans to expand to Arrowhead’s coffee shop and into the kitchen area.  These plans will be spear-headed by Naomi Sheperd who will be taking over for me as committee leader for the 2022-2023 school year.” 

To help raise money for this program you can donate here.