On March 6, PAISBOA Sustainability Group met virtually to review the Sustainability School Survey results, now in its third year. The survey aims to document the sustainability practices and progress among PAISBOA schools, and enables individual schools to see where they fall in comparison to peer institutions. PAISBOA’s Ron Hill and Boyer Sudduth’s Mary Ann Boyer and intern, Fernando Leon Rueda, shared the survey findings.
On March 8, the PAISBOA Sustainability Group hosted a virtual panel discussion: “Leading Change: Environmental Sustainability at Your School.” Panelists included Lisa Carbone Warren, Director of Finance & Operations at Moorestown Friends School (MFS), and Carolyn Hapeman, Dean of Finance & Operations at Westtown School and Mary Ann Boyer of Boyer Sudduth Environmental Consultants.
On December 9, 2022, educators, policymakers, scientists, and family members across the nation met virtually via Zoom to discuss the intersection of sustainability and education at Women for a Healthy Environment’s 2022 Healthy Schools Summit.
What do environmental sustainability, electronic waste, and the criminal justice system have in common? Employment opportunities in sustainability-related fields, known as “green jobs,” can help formerly incarcerated individuals to reenter society and successfully build their careers. Since 2016, People Advancing Reintegration (PAR) Recycle Works, a non-profit organization based in North Philadelphia, provides valuable job training and practical skills to formerly incarcerated people.
Studies show that being outside in nature has the ability to calm and heal. Spending as little as 15 minutes in nature lowers cortisol stress levels and blood pressure. Nature helps foster our creativity and observation skills. With the increase of screen time, we often forget to unplug and head outside.
In early March, before our world was turned upside down by the pandemic, 54 businesses took the 2020 Green Business on the Hill self assessment led by the Chestnut Hill Business Association and Boyer Sudduth Environmental Consultants. This second installment of the self assessment consisted of 105 questions covering how businesses handle waste, energy usage, and healthy air quality in their workplace.
Thirty-three participants from 17 schools attended PAISBOA’s Sustainability Group meeting at Ancillae-Assumpta Academy on January 15, 2019; the topic: Schools, Climate Change & Solutions. Climate Reality Leadership Corps member and Haverford College’s Vice President & Chief of Staff Jesse Lytle gave a solutions-oriented presentation on climate change.
How much waste does one elementary school produce each lunch period? This was the question that motivated William F. Cooke Elementary School’s Talented and Gifted (TAG) program students to conduct a waste audit on March 13th. Realizing that they needed to know what they were up against before they could make a change, the students of the TAG program at Cooke set out to find exactly what was in their waste
Cooke Elementary students predict how much waste they generate in the cafeteria before weighing each bag as part of their waste audit.
Teacher Christine Szegda received a grant from the Delaware Pathways to Green Schools Program. Ms. Szegda enlisted school sustainability consultants, Mary Ann Boyer and Sam York of Boyer Sudduth Environmental Consultants (BSEC) to help plan and run the audit. Together, they set the date for the first waste audit on March 13th and developed an agenda for the day.
When the day came, Ms Szegda’s TAG students, the Cooke Elementary Custodial staff, BSEC, and parent volunteers came together to make the day a success. The fact that it was chili day did not deter the TAG students, who eagerly investigated the waste in order to find the information that would let them develop an action plan for reducing waste.
What the students found was staggering: the school’s 653 students in grades K - 5 produced 153 pounds of trash and 13 pounds of recycling from just one day of cafeteria waste, and 33.4 pounds of liquid waste from emptied water and milk bottles. Using these numbers, we can estimate that in one week, the school produces 653 pounds of trash, 65 pounds of recycled materials, and 167 pounds of liquid waste. Imagine what those numbers are in a school year? But this is only a single school! As parent volunteer Lisa Call said, “Imagine how much is wasted in Delaware alone, not to mention the rest of the country.”
These numbers motivated TAG students to immediately pull together plans for how to reduce the amount of waste produced. Ms. Szegda and her students will develop an action plan for making changes to reduce waste and increase recycling. They will implement changes and conduct a second waste audit in the spring to compare their results with this first one. According to one student, "We want the cafeteria to stop using styrofoam lunch trays. They get used once and then sit in a landfill for thousands of years after!”
Students were surprised by how much food was thrown away each day. “After combing through unopened snack bags, unpeeled bananas, and half eaten lunches,” noted Ms Szegda, “they had a real ah-ha moment.” The students learned that the average American throws out 4.4 pounds of trash a day. After seeing the food waste, students began to think about more sustainable and affordable solutions. Giving students only as much food as they will eat and encouraging students to use the "share bin" would help reduce the amount of food that would end up in a landfill each day.
The students found some positive data too: almost everything that was put into the recycling was recyclable. They now know, however, just how big their task is. Over the coming weeks, Ms. Szedga and her students will look more closely at waste and help teach others about what they can do to lessen their environmental footprint. The students will review the data from the audit and develop an action plan for reducing the waste. Ms Szedga reflected, “Making effective change always takes hard work, but I’m sure the students will use their creative energy and enthusiasm to show others how to make Red Clay a greener place.”
Article submitted by Sam York, intern of Boyer Sudduth Environmental Consultants.
Springside Chestnut Hill Academy recently earned the Green Flag award from the National Wildlife Federation’s Eco-Schools USA program, making it the first independent school in Pennsylvania to win this award for sustainability progress. SCH’s green footprints have been purposeful over the past two decades. Its initiatives have extended from the classroom to the roofs and from the cafeterias to the Wissahickon Watershed. In 2012, the U. S. Department of Education recognized SCH as a Green Ribbon School. SCH joined the Eco-Schools USA program in order to have additional benchmarks to accelerate progress.
Friends’ Central School recently launched an energy saving project on both of its Wynnewood campuses, projected to save 38% of energy used annually. Equal to 9,100 million BTU’s, these savings are the equivalent of eliminating the carbon emissions of 3,000,000 miles driven by passenger cars, or the carbon absorption of 30,000 trees for 10 years.
