Waste Not Wednesdays
GIPL board member Marti Breen shares an inspired practice All Saints' Episcopal introduced this year in an effort to reduce waste.
At All Saints’ Episcopal, the amount of garbage generated at Wednesday Night Suppers (WNS) had been slowly creeping up. Earth Stewards wondered if we couldn’t change the direction by pointing out the problem. We took a two step approach: First, point out the problem and talk about what effect all the waste we were generating has. Second, begin measuring the amount of waste we were generating to map our progress to reduce waste.We started the educational process during our Talking Trash Series conducted on Wednesday nights with the adults. Then we took our message to the kids, meeting with them at Children's Church to talk about the problems associated with all the waste we were creating and tell them about our plan to reduce it.Since All Saints is full of type A personalities, we decided it might be more successful if we made it competitive. So, we devised a contest that would pit the adults against the kids to see who could generate the least amount of waste during a given period. Since attendance at WNS is always high right after the holidays, we picked January to conduct the contest.With the help of our publications, we advertised the upcoming contest, both through posters around the campus, on our Facebook page, in the weekly paper bulletin, and the electronic bulletin. Then all we had to do was show up on Wednesdays to weigh the plates and report the results.
The kids were really engaged and many had told their parents they needed to go to WNS so they could participate. They ended up winning the contest, although the results were very close. The most important thing to come out of it was the amount of waste that was reduced—just by measuring what we were throwing out, we managed to half the amount of waste from the beginning of the contest to the end.During February we’re following up on our ‘Talking Trash’ series by visiting Waste Pro, the recycling center that processes the contents of the blue herbies for the city of Atlanta. We’ve scheduled it for a weekday (the only time the recycling facility is in operation) when the kids are not in school so they can attend.Overall, it was a worthwhile exercise—one that engaged the whole congregation and raised everyone’s awareness that each little bit of effort can come together to really make an impact on our call to care for creation.