Students wrote letters. They talked to the director of food services. But year after year, Arlington Heights School District 25 used disposable Styrofoam trays to serve students lunch.
“The subject came up almost every single year,” said Coletta Hines-Newell, director of food services, adding that solutions were elusive.
Washing plastic trays wouldn’t work because the buildings were not designed to handle the mechanics of such a process. Recycling Styrofoam in the region served by the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County is basically non-existent.
But when two parents, Liana Allison and Mary Jo Warskow, got involved last April, they were determined to find solutions.
They calculated that in just one year, the district is responsible for trays that, stacked on top of each other, measure 1.5 times the height of the Willis Tower.
“That didn’t seem like an acceptable legacy,” Allison said.
The district looked into getting a densifier, which squishes Styrofoam materials for recycling, similar to one Maryville Academy in Des Plaines debuted last year. But an on-site densifier could not handle the approximately 2,000 trays used each day, Hines-Newell said.
But that idea led to Dart Container Corporation, a North Aurora-based company that recycles Styrofoam. The trays are made of 97 percent air, Hines-Newell said, so compacting them significantly reduces the nearly 2,600-foot stack of trays each year.
Dart then transports the squished trays to a recycling facility in Michigan, which can transform the materials into simulated wood to make items such as picture frames and rulers. The trays avoid the dump entirely.
Even after finding an acceptable solution, the parents and school staff still had a bit of PR campaign on their hands. Students are used to dumping all their food, tray and all, into a garbage can and running out to recess.
An illustration of the problem was in order, parents said. Taking trays produced over four days at Westgate Elementary and cleaning them with the help of their children and local Scouting groups, they created a stack that reaches to the 9-foot ceiling in the school.
It’s motivation, said Allison and Warskow, for the kids to “whack and stack” their trays. The students must police themselves to ensure that enough food is scraped off to make the trays acceptable for recycling, a tough task on spaghetti day.
Janet Joy, a fourth-grade teacher at Windsor Elementary School, said her students happily scrape and clean.
“They tell me, ‘This is what we’re supposed to be doing,’” she said. “They’re very enthusiastic.”
Alex Burkhardt, a student at Westgate, said the extra time it takes to clean the trays is worth it when he looks at the tray tower he helped build.
Food services is collecting data to see if the new effort is cost-effective. The only expenses are for transporting the trays, which are housed in a trailer that formerly contained lawn mowing equipment. Dart does not charge for its services.
Hines-Newell hopes the district will save money in its trash-hauling budget and shift the savings to pay for the recycling.
“I’m so excited to finally be moving in this direction,” she said.
“If there’s a great example of public and private, teachers, administrators and parents working together, this is it,” Allison said.
