Henry Sibley Students Move Dirt for Earth Day

Business was a little slow due to the wet weather Friday afternoon, but any way you shoveled it, Earth Day was a success.

Members of the Henry Sibley Environmental Club were on hand south of the high school track, shovels at the ready to dig, load and sell compost. The compost originated in District 197 schools, was treated and processed at The Mulch Store and returned to the district.

“The coolest part is we’re coming full circle with our compost project,” said Lisa Johnson, district energy manager. “The kids take their lunch waste and it gets hauled away, and its made into compost, and it comes back into our facility where kids, families, anyone in the community can come pick it up and use this in their own gardens, pots, lawns. So it’s pretty cool. They produced it and now it’s back.”

Students were selling compost for $2 for a 5-gallon pail or $5 for 15 gallons. By mid-afternoon they had had about 10 customers, most of whom bought more than one bucket of compost. The compost was a mixture of green and brown waste materials generated in the schools, containing everything from food waste, clean paper, leaves and yard trimmings, black dirt and sand.

The Sibley Environmental Club will hold another compost day at the same location from 1 to 5 p.m. Friday, May 6.

Sibley students are becoming more environmentally aware, said Corie Rice, a junior at Henry Sibley High School.

“Everyone is getting a lot more educated about the composting and recycling processes, which are kind of new,” said Rice. “Obviously we have a lot of compost made.”

This week members of the environmental club were offering free Chipotle coupons to students who they saw were composting correctly.

“We just do little things like that to try to give them more motivation to compost and it’s been working out well,” said Rice.  

Each school in the district has an environmental club.

“They all do a little bit different,” Johnson said. “Initially the first part of the year they work on promoting recycling and composting. ... with posters, different events in the cafeterias and also work on conserving energy.

“October is National Energy Awareness Month so we do a lights-out challenge where everyone is reminded to turn things out, all the things that they use, and they do that in various ways,” Johnson continued. “In January and February we pick a week and call it Energy Week, and each day we have different activities that focus on saving energy, turning things off and then is our big Earth Day event.”