Talking Trash
The Maine Science Festival included a Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions session on the components and complexities of Maine’s solid waste stream
By David Sims
On Friday, March 18 at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, the three-day 2016 Maine Science Festival got underway as hordes of students from around the state took part in numerous, diverse exhibits running the gamut of science—including the science of solid waste or “materials management.”
The “Talking Trash” session, which was under the umbrella of “Cool Science,” was a gloved-hands-on demonstration of the components that make up a typical waste stream in Maine, and how smart choices can help reduce, reuse, and recycle that waste.
As things began, and under the guidance of UMaine’s Travis Blackmer of the School of Economics and the Mitchell Center, a steady stream of elementary and middle school students stepped up to the table in small groups to get down and dirty with trash.
Before diving into the work of the Talking Trash table, each student was outfitted with a clear plastic poncho, big green rubber gloves, and goggles. The only things they weren’t protected from were the faint odors of the organic waste that was part of the mix—egg shells, potato and onion skins, banana and orange peels, etc.
A fifth grader plucked a book from the heap of mixed trash haphazardly arranged inside a small, orange plastic sled perched on the tabletop. The sled was filled with pickle jars, glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans, a wide variety of papers, plastic bags, Styrofoam, egg cartons, egg shells, potato and banana peels—you name it.
The young boy pondered the fate of his “trash book.” Into which of four containers on the floor below the garbage heap should it be placed—“Re-use Me,” “Recycle Me,” “Compost Me,” or “Trash Me.” After a few seconds, the student opted for Re-use Me, which generated a round of applause from the Mitchell Center staff on hand for the event—faculty members Blackmer, Linda Silka, and Cindy Isenhour, and student interns Sierra Kuun, Jen Rudolph, and Adam Fortier-Brown.
“Right, you can reread a book,” Blackmer stressed. “From books to pickle jars, necklaces and aluminum cans, you can repurpose this stuff, recycle it, give it to someone else to use. And what’s more, if you compost all your organic household waste, it will breakdown over time and can be used to plant flowers or vegetables.”
From garbage to gold
At the end of the table, assistant professor of anthropology Cindy Isenhour picked up three small cardboard boxes of compost labeled, respectively, “Brand New, Half-way Done, All Done.”
Isenhour explained to the students that in the beginning the “compost” is comprised of things like grass clippings, orange and onion peels, banana skins, and other food waste. In the middle stage, it has begun to look more like soil after having undergone “some serious biological breakdown” and, thus, smells a bit on the ripe side. Encountering the middle box up close and personal causes a couple of girls to cringe and back away. The All Done box, however, looks, feels, and smells like rich, dark, soil.
This compost was generated by the UMaine waste auger—a giant rotating screw housed in a trailer—that takes all pre-consumer campus food waste (that is, organic waste created during food preparation such as carrot and potato peelings), adds cow bedding from the university’s Witter Farm, and is treated by mixing and heating. Three weeks later, fresh compost has been created and is used across UMaine’s campus for soil amendment and flower gardens.
Three young, female students gathered around the compost table and Isenhour noted, “All the organic waste in a landfill breaks down anaerobically—that is, without oxygen—and this creates methane gas. And do you know what methane does?” The girls note that it gets burned off and Isenhour added, “Yes, but methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that can add to climate change.”
Isenhour continued, “If all Mainers composted their household organic waste, do you know how much of our waste stream would not go into landfills?” The kids threw out some guesses before Isenhour answered “over thirty percent.” Some of the students were noticeably impressed while another proudly piped up, “We have a giant pile of compost behind our house.”
Blackmer, through his UMaine research on the materials management issue, has become the resident expert in all things garbage. (See the story “Garbage Man” on the Mitchell Center website.)
As small groups of students rotated through the Talking Trash event and tried their hand playing garbage person, when kids “missed the mark” by disposing an item in the wrong container, Blackmer redeposited things in their rightful place, and carefully explained why.
“Almost all paper products are recycled, except when they’re ‘polycoated’ with a plastic-like material.” He took a paperboard box out of the Trash Me bucket and put it in Recycle Me, and a sheet of plastic film was retrieved from the Recycle Me bucket and deposited in Trash Me. Conversely, some plastic products that are not as common as soda bottles or milk jugs were pulled from Trash Me and recycled.
“Many of these plastic products have numbers on the bottom or elsewhere—from 1 to 7, which means they can likely be recycled,” Blackmer explained. The kids often stumbled over where to put ubiquitous grocery store plastic bags, which Blackmer noted can be recycled at many stores or reused in homes for storage or as small trash bags. “Or they can just be trashed. But better yet would be not to generate them at all by using reusable cloth bags as much as possible,” Blackmer said.
In between his coaching, Blackmer mixed in some tantalizing “trash facts” and on a laptop perched on the table, he had these fun fifth-grader/trash factoids displaying:
How many tons of materials are generated by Maine communities every year?
- 1.2 million tons or 24 million 100-pound 5th graders!
How many tons of construction demolition debris does Maine generate a year?
- 700,000 tons (in 2014) or 14 million 100-pound 5th graders!
When a new group of students stepped up the the table to get suited up for the task at hand, Blackmer always asked them where they were from and what their town’s waste management system included. Some kids provided detailed answers, many didn’t.
“Some knew that their town had zero-sort recycling, or drop-off recycling at their local transfer station.” Blackmer commonly discussed with the students the items that are not being recycled everywhere, such as #3-7 plastics and certain types of paperboard boxes. He suggested to students from drop-off recycling communities that they ask their local transfer station operator for more information on all the possible items they could recycle.
“I’ve never done a demonstration like this for kids,” said Blackmer, who completed a waste composition study for the state in 2011 on a much larger and much stinkier scale—and found the experience eye-opening.
“The hope was that attendees at the science fair would feel the same way after participating in the Talking Trash session, and they most certainly did!” Blackmer happily noted after the event. “Students were amazed at the options available beyond simply throwing everything in a traditional garbage can, and some teachers were talking about upcoming events to analyze their school’s waste, introduce recycling and/or composting, or other plans to improve their management of materials.”