North Andover Sustainability Committee member and mom Joanna O’Connell set out on a mission to cut down on food waste in North Andover schools, and with the help of eco-conscious students and lunchroom and custodial staff, that mission is being accomplished.

“We were already recycling really well as a school district,” O’Connell said as she sipped coffee at Good Day Café on High Street waiting for school lunch periods to begin so she could check out their progress. “We were able to move past that and focus on food waste, which is good.”

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Here’s the process:

• Kids separate their lunch waste by recyclables and food and put the food waste into green bins at the end of lunch, with student helpers guiding them.
• The custodians (O’Connell got them wheels for the trash barrels) then bring the waste outside to a specified composting bin.
• Merrimack Valley-based OffBeet Compost comes and picks up the bins twice a week.
• OffBeet turns that waste into soil at sites in Haverhill and Lowell, which is then sold to local farms, and the company’s owner also ships some to people who are in an OffBeet program. O’Connell, for example, pays $5 a week and leaves her compost outside for them to pick up, and twice a year she gets soil back.

The program, funded by the state this year, so far involves the Thomson and Kittredge elementary schools as well as North Andover Middle School and seeks to cut 30 percent of the town’s trash truck waste by removing compostable stuff from the trash stream.

Teachers helped get the kids excited with training videos about composting and the importance of cutting down on food waste.

“I kind of said to them, ‘We’re going to take out this 30 percent, we’re going to get it to a local farm, and they’re going to move it around, care for it, and in nine months or so, it’s going to turn back into soil, and that soil is then going to be used to plant your crops that you’re then eating,’” O’Connell said.

Benefits of school composting programs include:

• Cutting down on food waste
• Allowing kids who hear scary environmental news on a daily basis to get involved in fixing the problems
• Teaching kids about nature and science with hands-on experience
• Less work for the custodial staff who have to lug around trash bags after lunch
• Giving kids a purpose they can carry with them into adulthood and maybe save the world’s environmental issues

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