Providence Special Committee on Environment & Resiliency-Wednesday, June 12, 2024-5:30 PM

Oh,. Hi. To work from the property department. Can you get those out?

I'm gonna

have to go make a copy because we need one for the record. Sorry about that. That's okay. Thanks very much.

You're welcome.

You wanna make a copy? Yeah. You just make one copy. How many

Five. Four.

Instead of a split, it's just a number that we need.

I think half of it, like, says,

like Go, honey.

I'm the chair of the committee, and not only for Ward 3. Can you please take the role? Chairperson Handeloff. I'm here. Vice Chairperson Sanchez?

Here.

Councilwoman Anthony? Here. Councilman Espenald?

Present.

Councilman Goyads?

Present.

We have five present.

We have a four.

Awesome. Thank you so much. For everything they do. You got questions. Let's head office here today.

I think Patricia from our policy team here as well to help us out. So I don't think I can see anyone on the set. If I am, I'm so sorry. But I... We have some great presentations today, so I'm gonna not talk very much.

I just wanna welcome all of our amazing new guests and speakers today. We are both from today on. As the community knows, the circular economy and waste version is a big part of our climate justice plan and how we're gonna implement that in the city. There's a lot of really big stuff happening around expanding composting, expanding community level composting in all of our neighborhoods and are quite another role to be really great initiates. We're interested in sharing that and the recommendations with council.

So we invited them here today. We all come out soon in, so I'm super talking about. Also, we need a bishop from. But the opportunity, could you please read item number one to be attended? Presentation and discussion relative to composting and wage diversion in the city.

Invited speakers Warren Hayman, Stuart Martin, and Carla McDowie, Zero Waste Prophets. Awesome. And so Carla's in Zero Waste, and then Warren and Stuart are separate. And we're actually gonna start with Warren and his team because he's got a lot of students here. So...

Oh, there he is. Yeah. Warren, if you wanna come to the table and then any of your total presenters at home. Okay. And then before Yeah.

That would be.

Yeah. If you could say your name for the record. So whenever people pop in, if you could... That would be great.

So my name is Warren Yinen. I'm the organizing director for the Rhode Island School Recycling Project, and this is Kelly, who's a facilitator with us. And we have many students and others who can speak. So Kelly and I are gonna just sort of set the table, and then we'll bring all the students so they can be lifted. Wanna first start by thanking you, committee, chairwoman, and your committee for inviting us here.

We appreciate the opportunities. And I wanna say hi to my mom who's in New York. She's 91, who's currently watching us. So

She's on.

So Yep. So we have a brief... Very brief PowerPoint. So we're with the Rhode Island School Recycling Project. Next slide, please.

So as you probably know, food waste is a huge problem, in our city, our state, and our country, and around the globe. A third of the food that is produced on the farm is thrown out. They roll it. They ship it. They process it.

It goes to our homes of restaurants with stools, and then it goes into the trash. And all of the energy, water, and effort that goes into making that food and producing it is also wasted. It's bad for the environment. When you take food and you bury it at a landfill that produces methane, methane is worse than carbon dioxide, and that's why we have global climate. And then on top of that, a third of the families, at least, are food insecure.

So we have families and children who are not getting enough food to eat while we're throwing food out. So our project was designed to try to address that in a very direct way in the public schools. Next slide, please. So these are just some slides that we took pictures of the students that are involved in our program. That's.

That's Juan, the custodian who works with the rangers, and we'll talk about that in a minute. During the week that we launch at PVD Prep, and there's some people from PVD Prep today who will present. Next slide, please.

Thanks. Oh, sorry.. Come back.

There we go. Last week, we had an award ceremony. Part of the of the program is to help develop student leadership. And as part of that, at the end of the first year that we are in play, we do a... An award ceremony.

All of the student rangers get a certificate. So you'll see councilwoman Harris, the mayor, the superintendent,, Dave from the DEM presenting. That's a phone week last week. We really rocked the house. Someone said to me, wow.

It's like a concert. So next slide, please. Native vision part part of what we do is when there are parents or or teachers or students who are interested in, like, less less in addition to taking our food waste and making it in the compost and giving it to farmers, why don't we also throw some stuff here and so we can have this circularity thing? We built four raised beds at Nathan Bishop. You see a gentleman on the left who's here.

Bob is a member of the PTL and parent who helped rebuild those beds. And then there's some students here, including a student here who helps water them. And then the students are growing, and

you

can see the signs of English and Spanish. We're growing food there, which will then be, hopefully, in the fall, you know, be part of the. Next slide, please. And this is just some of the students' names and and that work on those beds at Nathan Bishop. Next slide, please.

This is the launch at. So what you see in the center, we set up a five stop sorting station. The first stop is the share table. We capture the unopened milks, or oranges, bananas, yogurts. Instead of going into the trash and then going to the landfill, we capture it.

We buy a refrigerator for the school. We set that up. And then the good food gets immediately put into that refrigerator for the students that are hungry, then they pour off the liquids. They recycle. They throw the trash, and then we compost the food waste.

And at the end of the year, Bootstrap, which is company that we work with, gives back 200 pounds of compost in school with the use on it on the beds. Next slide, please. So this is other in Providence, and we're in other communities as well. Smithfield, we're about to be in many communities. So...

But in Providence, we're Nathan Bishop, NLK, Martin Gordon, Levittan, language,, debate, Nostramondo, B2B Prep, and Esposiano. We... I met with... Or we met with the principals at George West. We hope to go there in the fall, and we have money to do more schools.

So if there's schools in your neighborhood that are not on the system, you would like us to do that, my contact information is on the back here, and happy to chat with that with anybody. I don't want my boss to get back to some people. Trying to

get too many stools too quickly. Next slide, please.

Thank you. My name is Kelly Mangelis. I'm a facilitator with Rhode Island School Recycling Project, And I just wanna highlight some of the impressive work that we've done with the students in our schools. So, as you know, our landfill is is rapidly filling up, and so it's important to divert food away from the landfill. And so far, we've done an astonishing amount.

Over 68 tons of food waste diverted from the landfill, the equivalent to a space shuttle.. Next

slide.

And the reduction is quite significant. So the amount of tracks that a school sees before and after implementing our Get Food Smart program is significant. It... We went from 80 tons to 12 tons after implementing our sorting stations, and that's a reduction of 85% of long term waste that's going to low. Slide.