Team Marine tackles school sustainability

After months of conducting a thorough analysis of Samo’s waste stream through a study called a waste audit, Team Marine presented their findings along with requests for sustainability improvement at Samo to the Board of Education this past April, and are now working to improve the school’s sustainability. “Team Marine is a student group at Samo devoted to abating climate change, ocean acidification and aiding in the transition of our school, neighborhood, city, and state communities from our current practices to those of sustainability,” senior member Ansel Garcia-Langley (’20) said. In their waste audit, Team Marine identified the types of waste Samo generates, with respect to amounts of materials potentially recyclable, compostable and inevitably having to be sent to landfills from random samples of trash and recycling bins across campus. According to their study, from the 600 pounds of waste produced at Samo per day, 60 percent is compostable, 30 percent is recyclable and only 10 percent of the school’s overall waste is trash. This means that 90 percent of Samo’s waste could potentially be diverted from landfills. This presentation to the Board of Education was a follow up to one given at the culmination of the 2016-17 school year. In result of the board presentation, Team Marine requested a sustainability coordinator for the district, and Caroline Coster was appointed. Coster helped enable the work Team Marine performed during the 2017-18 school year and expanded communication between the students and the district. The roughly 20 minute presentation consisted of general news about Team Marine’s work during the year, coupled with new asks of the board based on the results and findings of the aforementioned waste audit: a working composting system (a third dumpster for compostable material and a third waste bin added to waste stations around campus and in classrooms) and more sustainability education for students within curriculum. Team Marine also congratulated the board on the sustainable changes it has implemented since the year before. “The members in our team worked really hard on this presentation and getting the data; therefore being able to present to the board to make them aware of the waste issue in our school and how we could collaborate to take on the problem was awesome, member Isabel Reissmeier (’21) said. Working with Team Marine during the 2017-18 school year, Coster was able to get Samo’s waste hauler to pick up the correct dumpsters (recycling and trash) and fixed the mis-coordinated color issue. In previous years, although Samo had both recycling and trash dumpsters, both were being sent to landfills. This sparked concern from students who cared deeply about the planet’s well-being, and was something Team Marine strived to remedy.This year they will most likely be finishing up their project from last year (the staff/student body education side of it) but have not decided where they are going to go with their next project. “One potential project we might do involves pursuing more environmentally conscious supplies management within the district through phasing out single-use dry erase markers. We might also go off of the momentum of Santa Monica's recent single use plastic ban [that occurred less than a month ago] in restaurants and continue to expand upon that within our district,” Garcia-Langley said . Additionally, following the presentation, Team Marine was invited by the Board of Education to conduct future presentations focusing on the education sides of the waste issues, however details of these presentations are not available at this time. It is certain that the students will be working hard to make these presentations a reality as the school year progresses.“Overall, I would say the goal of Samo is to be pushing what is possible in environmental sustainability. It is to be the model school and for our district to be the model for a sustainably run education system as well as being able to output students that are environmentally literate. You would think the city of Santa Monica would be at the frontline in terms of abating climate change, but we haven’t made as much progress in this respect as some would hope, so the ultimate goal is for our entire community to be the leaders in these changes,” Garcia-Langley said.