Compost Days to end with sticker competition

Cedar Grove is tapping into kids' interest in stickers by making a game out of keeping produce stickers out of yard waste bins

Kids love stickers.

Cedar Grove is tapping into their interest by making a game out of keeping produce stickers out of yard waste bins. And the company is bringing the game to Glacier Park Elementary later this month.

Every year, Cedar Grove and several businesses in the Puget Sound region lead a month-long drive to get compost into local community and school gardens.

Compost Days, as it’s called, began March 15 and ends April 15.

For every bag of Cedar Grove compost sold at participating retailers, another bag is donated to a local community or school garden through their Big Garden Give program.

Consumers can also get a discount on the compost using a coupon found on Cedar Grove’s website.

At the end of these four weeks, Glacier Park students will participate in a competition to get more compost donated to their school for their garden.

For every class that participates, each student will get a sticker card, which looks a lot like a bingo card.

Students take them home and collect 25 produce stickers to put on the card and turn it in to their teacher. For every complete sticker card, Cedar Grove will donate one bag of compost to the school. In addition, the classroom that completes the most cards will be treated to a pizza party.

Karen Dawson, director of community relations for Cedar Grove, said the purpose of the game is purely education.

“The piece that makes recycling successful is education about what goes into the bin,” she said in a phone interview.

What doesn’t go into the bin are produce stickers, because most are not compostable. A large majority of them are coated in plastic, and are often too small for the sifter to collect, Dawson said.

Taking them off prior to putting peels and other food scraps into the yard waste bin helps create a better final compost product.

Cedar Grove has two plants in Washington where they produce their compost – one near Maple Valley and another in Everett. Combined, the two plants helped divert more than 375,000 tons of food scraps from the trash last year.

Also last year, the company donated over 1,100 yards of compost to community gardens in the region during the Big Garden Give.

This year’s Compost Days participating retailers in the area include Johnson’s Home & Garden and the Fred Meyer stores in Maple Valley and Covington.