Kelly Stewart

Staff Writer

If you think the Sustainability Expo is a nice idea, but does not really do much to rally people to be more eco-friendly, think again. With help from the Coppell Community Gardens, seniors Ashley Attanucci and Kevin Bonnot have created a compost pile for the Coppell High School library garden.

“Kevin and I decided to start the compost pile because I’ve been involved in the community gardens for a year now,” Attanucci said. “And so I’ve seen all the benefits that compost provides, I mean it affects so many different realms, like gardening, you know it’s greener sending your waste to a compost pile rather than a landfill, so we felt like Coppell High School could benefit from having one.”

Attanucci got the idea after an assignment from her AP Environmental Science, to research a project for the Sustainability Expo.

“[Ashley’s] topic was hazardous waste and what she wanted to do because she was involved in the Community Gardens, she wanted to do composting,” AP Environmental Science teacher Holly Anderson said. “And she wanted to research what composting is about and how it works and that kind of thing so she came up with the idea to start a compost pile here.”

Initially the plan was met with skepticism from Principal Brad Hunt and other school officials, who were concerned that the compost pile would emit a bad smell. However, the students were able to research and make sure what was being put into the pile (such as meat, which could go rancid) would not produce this affect.

After getting the green light from the library staff, Attanucci and Bonnot asked the people at the community gardens for advice on how to start the compost pile, as well as how often to turn it. They even obtained a composting bin to store the compost in.

Composting is an excellent thing to do at home, because you can put almost any kitchen scraps into the pile, saving you both the nutrients that would have been lost and money that would have been spent on chemical fertilizer.

“[Composting] retains nutrients from things that we normally discard, at least if we’re talking about Coppell,” Julia Daily of Coppell Community Gardens said. “Instead of throwing away yard trash [such as clippings and leaves] you can compost it and retain all of the nitrogen and whatnot, that’s fixed and put it back into the soil.”

There are a number of ways to start a personal compost pile, and even if there is no room for an actual pile, even just burying it in the yard works to transfer the nutrients. Besides kitchen scraps, yard trimmings can be used as well as newspaper. The key thing to remember with a compost pile is to keep it moist so that bacteria can grow and break down the compost.

However, even if you cannot attempt composting, you can still give your grass trimmings to a worthy cause – every Saturday, Coppell Waste Management picks up grass trimmings and leaves and brings them to the gardens to be composted, if the leaves are in paper sacks instead of plastic ones.