Tahoma School District students are now recycling food scraps on all campuses.

From now on the majority of lunchroom waste will be recycled by Cedar Grove Composting instead of sent to the landfill.

Many of the schools, such as Tahoma Junior High, have had recycling programs in place for several years already. Tahoma Middle School was the last school to launch the program, which started this month.

According to the School District’s PIO Kevin Patterson, the schools created individualized programs for their student body, faculty and staff and specifically the custodial staff.  At schools such as Tahoma Junior High, there are three different colored garbage cans in the cafeteria. The red is for food, the blue is for recyclable products such as milk cartons and the gray one is for garbage.

The food scraps are then collected by Cedar Grove Composting, a Maple Valley-based company.

Mark Sutton, a Tahoma Junior High employee, said the process was tricky at first, but students are learning quickly.

“It gets a lot easier,” he said.

According to Kim McHenry, Tahoma Junior High’s green team leader, diverting food to compost will not only help Cedar Grove, but it will also decrease the amount of space used in the landfills.

“Basically the landfill takes so much time to brown down, if we can get the food waste, they actively turn it over and then they can sell that,” she said. “So keeping that out of the landfill is going to reduce that amount of waste.”

According to Bob Moselle of Cedar Grove Composting, the Tahoma School district will divert approximately 134 tons of food per year. At Tahoma Middle School, the new composting program will benefit another new feature at the school: a rain garden that filters rooftop runoff.

McHenry added that the schools are trying to use as many compostable products, such as lunch trays, as possible.

“Sometimes I don’t think we’re recycling enough,” she said. “We’re not throwing away as much garbage as we used to.”

The Green Team also promotes waste-free Fridays by encouraging students to have it so that their entire lunch can be either eaten, recycled or sent to compost.

“It’s so easy to reuse things,” McHenry said.

The Tahoma School District is the second school in the Puget Sound region to have each of its schools participate in organics recycling. Mukilteo School District was first.