What’s a spring time without a cool field trip? Beyond Recycling didn’t disappoint this year for the grade 6’s in Mrs. Galina’s class at St Mary’s Catholic Independent School. As a wrap up to their 20+week program the students got to go on a waste field trip with a bonus good food stopover.
Like most years, the Beyond Recycling students joined Nathan from the Regional District of East Kootenay to explore some of the many options for disposing products in Cranbrook. We started at the Cranbrook Transfer Station, where recyclables get brought by community members and sorted into cardboard, plastics, and glass. Many were surprised to see the Transfer Station takes much much more than those basic items: batteries of all sizes, tires, used car oils, concrete, shingles, scrap metal, clean wood, and even mattresses. Here we encountered the first affront to our senses: the aromatic yard waste pile!
The next stop was the Materials Recycling Facility, where yellow bin recyclables are brought, sorted, and packed nicely into compressed “Wall-E” style cubes. These get packed into transport trucks and shipped off to the lower mainland for processing. It was fun to see the conveyor belts at work, diverting so much waste from the landfill.
And the landfill is exactly where we went next. Here, another affront to our senses, but not in fact the tipping floor – also known as the open garbage patch – it was the compost section! Students were surprised by quite a lot here: that not very much garbage is visible, the lifespan of the landfill continues to extend, even the quantity of birds scavenging their next meal!
Our final stop was a more pleasant aromatic experience – the Cranbrook Urban Farm’s hydroponic growing container of … lettuce! The four-season growing project aims to create a healthy resilient secure local food source. Using a combination of two different hydroponic systems, the greens grown get all the nutrients and water they need exactly when they need it. And this means, we get a pleasant, fresh smell to contrast the rest of our field trip day!
