Submitted by The City Of Olympia
Starting this school year, the City of Olympia is helping three Olympia School District schools reduce their waste with milk dispensers instead of using disposable milk cartons. Reeves Middle School and Roosevelt Elementary School will switch from disposable milk cartons to milk dispensers as school begins to provide milk for students. Margaret McKenny Elementary School is the third school starting this fall.
Students will use reusable cups to get their milk to further reduce waste. “The goal of the program is to reduce waste by discontinuing the use of disposable milk cartons,” says Spencer Orman, Senior Program Specialist with the City of Olympia Waste ReSources. “By eliminating throw-away milk cartons or having them picked up for recycling, the schools will be generating less waste, have lower disposal costs and reduce the amount of staff effort to do so.”
The cost of the milk remains about the same, and students will still have access to the required amount of milk. By switching to milk dispensers, each school can stop throwing away over 1,000 milk cartons a week. Depending on the school, that can be from 36,000 to 44,000 cartons per year or over 121,000 milk cartons combined from going to the landfill. The dispensers, along with stands, were purchased by the City with help from a coordinated prevention grant from the Washington State Department of Ecology. Installation of the dispensers and day-to-day management of them is done by the Olympia School District.
Currently, seven other schools in the district use milk dispensers. The reduction of milk carton waste at schools goes hand in hand with the City’s organics collection program at the schools started five years ago. The City collects organics for composting from 11 district schools weekly.
