Composting On Campus

Composting is the action of allowing food and plant waste to breakdown into a soil-like mixture, that recycles the nutrients, unused by humans, back into our food cycle. 

Our compost on campus has gone under much improvement since its startup, with Grade 3’s, 5’s, Green Campus and gardening groups on campus all contributing to the composting process, we should have a great deal of soil aid to feed our plants.

Grade 3’s have been collecting pod compost, food waste from various snack times and lunchtimes. Grade 5s are on a router of classes who compost during their lunchtimes, collecting orange peels, coffee groups and cafeteria scraps. The incredible edible team top up and turn the pile twice a week to encourage the breakdown process, mixing nitrogen and carbon-heavy material together. So that when it’s ready, they use it for their plants around the school! 

After the December break, the Grade 6s will be on a router to help out with a new program, Home Compost, to get staff involved in bringing their scraps from home, furthering the work we are doing to reduce the volume of waste burnt in Singapore.

What do we put in it? 

First of all we have to have our Nitrogen heavy materials, which are usually fresh and flexible plant waste, that help to provide and retain moisture. Material like grass clippings, fruit and vegetable scraps and weeds are great examples, and products we put in our compost at school. Next we need carbon heavy materials, which are older, harder, dry waste. They tend to be bulky that helps with the airflow for the breakdown process. Examples of this are fallen leaves, cardboard, tea bags and shredded paper. 

How does it work?

In composting, controlling the components is vital to ensure the chemical process of aerobic biodegradation happens. We do this by providing a good ratio of oxygen to water in the pile so that it breaks down properly. The decomposing microbes need oxygen for the chemical process breakdown, whilst the water feeds the microbes and maintains the temperature of the pile! Ideal compost is dark and crumbly. 

Why do we need to break down food scraps and organic matter? 

Plants have so many nutrients that can be used, that's why humans eat them, however, plants can use these nutrients in this full form. A chemical process has to occur to break down the complex compounds into a form a plant can take in. Within the chemical process inside a compost pile, proteins break down into amino acids which break into ions that are water soluble, great for plants! 

Why is organic compost better than store bought? 

Organic compost releases nitrogen at a slow but sustainable rate whilst synthetic fertilizers provide immediately available nitrogen, that is unsustainable for growth, leading to tall and thin plants, prone to weather damage. 

Is Composting Worth it?

Yes! It saves money and is a more sustainable fertilizer for your plants! Additionally, by diverting the food waste into your compost, you reduce the amount of landfill pilling up, (20% of it is food waste!)

Composting is an easy, cost effective process that everyone can benefit from, if not for plants in your own house, for those in your community! 

Eco Rangers in action.

Eco Rangers are a group of dedicated Grade 4 and 5 students who are passionate about sustainability and the environment. The students in the ECA meet every Thursday to plan and implement a variety of exciting initiatives for Dover campus.  Their actions focus on promoting sustainability, helping the environment and enjoying nature.

Just before the end of Term 1, the Eco Rangers presented in Grade 4 and 5 assemblies, encouraging Primary School students to be mindful of food waste and share the message “take what you can eat and eat what you take.” In collaboration with Sodexo’s ‘Waste LESS Week’, the Eco Rangers collected 130 pledges on the playground and promoted awareness for minimising food waste. In addition, the Eco Rangers appealed to the Grade 4 and 5 students to donate a non-perishable food item to Singapore’s Food Bank, to benefit those in need. Students were very proud to make a difference.

In 2015 785,500 tonnes of food waste was generated in Singapore, which amounts to a shocking 21, 520 trolleys each day!

(Source Waste Statistics and Overall Recycling NEA December 2015).

Composting at Dover hits the News!

Our long-running composting project at Dover described in earlier blog posts was recently featured on the Channel News Asia Website as well as on their facebook page where the video has received over 120, 000 views so far!

The project is run by a High School team as part of the Budden Composting Initiative started in 2012 following a generous donation to the UWCSEA Foundation. The daily collections of coffee grounds and fruit and vegetable peelings are made by Grade 5 students under the guidance of Junior School's Environmental Stewardship Co-ordinator, Nicole Kutschenreuter. The final product, a rich soil conditioning compost and fertiliser is used in our Incredible Edible Project in the vegetable and herb gardens. Congratulations to all involved for making this so successful a project, now in its 5th year of development and special thanks to our Sodexo team and Operations Department for establishing the waste separation system and continually working with the students to perfect the logistics.

The NTU Business students learn how to prepare the best compost mix

Many UWCSEA alumni wrote in to say how proud they were that UWC was featured in the news and following the article some business students from Nanyang Technological University were so impressed they came to see the process in action. As part of their Business course they are looking at sustainable solutions to food waste in Singapore and hope that their promotion of this will lead NTU to introduce a large scale system on their campus too. Hopefully even more educational institutions will adopt composting as one of the ways to address food waste, now that Dover has shown the way!

We welcomed the chance to share our process with NTU business students..and hope we have inspired other too

We shall soon be partnering with the National Environment Agency on a pilot scheme to divert our post-consumer food waste (the stuff that gets scraped off plates that we cannot compost) into a Biodigestion scheme that converts waste to energy for a water reclamation plant at Tuas. Plans are also underway to seek Government funding for our own Biodigester that could even compost our new disposable cups that Sodexo are using in the Heritage cafe.