How I Saved My School $25,000 a Year

Hey there,

So I thought I would share this story in the hopes that some of you may motivate to look into how your business/school/home can save money by becoming "greener".

Maybe it is not a coincidence that green is the color of money. It is at my school for sure.

The short answer of how my school is now saving $25,000 a year is this: we reduced our garbage bill. That's it.

The longer answer:

When I came to the school a year and half ago they had just started composting in the dining hall. This was organized by the San Francisco Department of the Environment. It was pretty easy since everyone at school eats the school lunch and we use washable plates, silverware, and glasses. So pretty much all the waste in there is compostable. (The only exceptions are things like aluminum foil when we have baked potatoes). The city of San Francisco collects compost just like recycling and trash so that makes it super easy.

Of course I quickly moved to suggest we start composting everywhere else - the bathrooms (all paper towels), the classrooms (mostly tissues and food scraps from snack), etc. Not surprisingly the brakes were put on me by the powers to be who had the big picture in mind and are weary of fast change happening without proper thought to who would be effected. I too, had all that in mind, but I quickly realized I needed to be patient. First we decided we should be at least composting in the staff lounge so we did, but I decided to take on emptying it and sorting through it myself so the custodial staff did not feel like they were given extra work.

I forget how long I did this, nearly a year I guess. When we first began composting in the staff lounge I had to really educate and remind people what can be composted. ( I still pick out a piece of plastic wrap each and every day and often find plastic creamer cups and other stuff in there.) My boss told me one day, when the subject came up, "you know people laugh at you behind your back because of the compost thing!" She said it in a totally frank way (her style) not meaning anything bad by it at all. She was just telling it like it is.

Signs explaining what goes where were key as were funny emails to remind people what can and can't be composted and recycled. Some teachers began composting in their classrooms and making 'compost monitor' a classroom job for the kids. I tried to help devise a system for composting the snack waste.

I continued to discuss behind the scenes the idea of composting in all classrooms and bathrooms. Everyone was basically behind it, a system just had to be put in place so the custodians did not have extra work.

The final factor that gave the final push from the top was when I made the case that we could save a lot of money.

I had called the trash service and asked them how much money we can save by reducing the trash we create. I was interested in how much money we had saved so far by composting and how much money we could save if we really went for it. I actually know the guy at the company from when I greened festivals. Anyway he had a formula on his computer that calculates our bill. Our current bill said we payed for 7 large black trash bins a day which was 60% of our waste. The other 40% was divided by green (compost) and blue(recycling). I jotted down how much we would pay for different scenarios and then calculated that for each of the 7 black bins we can switch to blue or green we would save about $500 a month. Sure we could knock two or three of them off I told the administration we could save at least a $1000 a month.

This helped grease the wheels and soon with everyone involved we got a system so the custodians can empty both green and black campus wide. We then ordered compost bins for all the classrooms and began composting in each class. The last push was to include the bathrooms. The bathroom trash consists of mainly paper towels so this is a no-brainer. We just put up signs and switched the liners in the trash cans from black to green. (the adult bathrooms have both trash and compost, both of which, despite the signs, end up with paper towels in them).

I then actually had to push to get rid of the unused black trash cans which was the step we had to take to save the money. I began noticing that there were cardboard boxes and bags of compost being thrown away into the trash cans. It seemed someone did not get it and that someone was the person deciding how many black cans to keep. Talking with everyone I finally got our number of black cans down to 3. This means we cut out 4 cans! Our official diversion away from the landfill is now something like 84% and we are saving $2,100 every month on our bill that was about $4,000 buck a month.

Finally when this was all said and done I looked at our garbage bill to see our savings and it turned out the company forgot to change our billing rate. So I called and then told the administration we were being over billed, which no one noticed.

One shocking secret to this whole thing is that we did not need to add as many green and blue bins as we reduced our black bins by. Which means we were paying for more black bins than we needed, probably for years. I figure even without the composting we probably could have cut out one or two black bins. Especially if we used them more efficiently by not throwing whole cardboard boxes away or filling them up with odd sized items that could be broken down to take up less space.

So even if you do not have the ability to compost, check out your trash dumpsters at work, school, or home, and see if you are using them wisely, you may be able to save some money for your self or your employer.

And of course all the waste you divert from the landfill towards recycling or compost saves energy and resources and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

save money and save the world at the same time!

peace, Danny