Team Marine works with SMMUSD to establish sustainable practices

On Thursday April 7, Team Marine and the pro-sustainability employees of SMMUSD held their first meeting of the year, focused on new ways to be more sustainable in our district.  Team marine members acting as hosts of the meeting invited various guest speakers.“The objective of the meeting was to get various people interested in sustainability, especially how we manage waste,” Team Marine advisor, Benjamin Kay said. “To understand how our waste management system works and what we are and are not doing sustainably so that different people that have an interest in the future of sustainability in our district can work together in a collaborative sense to [induce] a positive change.”To kick off the meeting Kay introduced Virginia Hyatt, the director of purchasing for SMMUSD, who discussed sustainable tools purchased for Samo. One discussed purchase was the Innovation Building’s solar ready system, as well as other solar-powered systems throughout the district. According to Hyatt, nine elementary schools district-wide produce 84 percent of their energy via solar panels.“I think that having the Innovation building being solar ready is an essential part in encouraging the city of Santa Monica to go carbon neutral. Although solar is currently expensive, the return on investment in terms of energy consumption and environmental heal is incalculable,” co-captain of Team Marine, Valerie Yong (’16) said.Next, Liz Powell and Kelly Lancaster spoke on behalf of Food Services, which provides breakfast, lunch and at certain schools, dinner for students in the district. Recently, they have successfully switched all the paper containers in the district  to compostable containers and changed the type of plastic used in plastic bottles and containers, plastic 6, into a recyclable plastic, plastic 1.“Our purpose of coming today was to talk about waste management and the new laws on compost,” Lancaster said.In 2011, the state of California passed the first of two assembly bills regarding recycling: AB 341 and AB 1826. AB 341 dictates that all facilities in California have to recycle, while AB 1826 states that all schools have to participate in composting.  Alyson Schill, the next to speak as a representative from TreePeople and Generation Earth, took the floor to talk about one of her recent projects regarding composting in schools.“[Schill] has worked with Team Marine in conducting a trash audit [at Samo] and advising us on ways to reduce our waste on campus. The results of our trash audit showed that recyclable items are not successfully sorted into the recycling bins,” Yong said.  “We plan to work with her in the future to encourage composting efforts on campus.”Lastly, Team Marine recapped many of the topics discussed and how they wish to improve our campus, including cisterns acting as filtration tank for rainwater, auspin pens – a reusable and recyclable alternative to expo markers and the use of environmentally safe cleaners and chemicals.“For our school, I think the key to beautifying our campus is sustainability,” Kay said. “We need to conserve resources, create a zero waste campus, infuse green education initiatives and provide opportunities for students to understand what’s going on with the environment and the solutions to protect the environment.”As the meeting came to a close, no specific goals were set, but Kay hopes to have planted a seed that will create a new era of a sustainability committee that will meet every month and be able to talk about the different issues throughout the district and devise plans to solve them.“If we don’t have a healthy planet, then we can’t bask in the lights of family and other aspects of life,” Kay said. “The bigger picture is that we can’t argue about gender issues or ethnicity or issues with guns, minimum wage, rights and etc. because none of that stuff matters if we don’t have clean air, water, soil and biodiversity.”Furthermore, Team Marine club members were happy with the results of the first of many meetings and look forward to what they can accomplish in the future for Samo.