Composting for a Better World

May 2, 2025

Today, Fox Creek Elementary School in eastern Highlands Ranch celebrated its Better World Day with composting as the theme. The kids learned about composting by making a presentation, flyers, and posters to spread the word. The school already had a compost pile in their garden to collect kitchen scraps, but this week the school added a compost option inside the school cafeteria so kids could start composting their own food waste at lunch instead of dumping it in the trash. They also added a compost drop-off bin from Compost Colorado outside to make it easier for neighbors and local community members to compost.

In the morning, classes rotated through various Better World Day activities. I had the pleasure of helping first and second graders look at compost through a magnifying glass and then play a sorting game to figure out which items in a bucket were compostable and which were not. We had some interesting discussions! They knew that nitrogen-rich fruit and vegetable items like banana peels and apple cores could be composted, as well as carbon-rich grass and leaves, and they knew that plastic packaging was not compostable. But what about paper? Or meat and dairy? Or a pencil? They learned that, at their school, they could compost all their left-over fruits and vegetables, as well as grass and leaves from the school grounds, and that through Compost Colorado they could also compost paper, meat and dairy. The pencil, however, had a metal band, a rubber eraser, and a graphite core, so it sadly had to join the plastic waste in the trash.

Thank you, Fox Creek and the Douglas County School District for making this happen!