Embracing Zero Waste in Alachua County

Hi! My name is Jennifer Seitz. I work for the Alachua County Office of Waste Alternatives as the Public Education Coordinator in Florida. Our focus is to provide quality waste alternatives public education and services to our community. My project focuses on encouraging residents in low-income neighborhoods to better manage their household waste through recycling, composting, reusing and reduction. My project has three sections: neighborhood, educators and gardening.

Neighborhood


The Cedar Ridge and Linton Oaks Preservation and Enhancement District strives to work with their community to make and maintain neighborhood improvements for approximately 560 residents. I partnered with Alachua County’s Partners for a Productive Community to work with the residents to better understand their waste management and recycling needs. I attended neighborhood meetings to find out why there was no recycling and the challenges residents had with bulk items (e.g., couches, tables) left on corners.

Working with our partners and the neighborhood community council and crime watch committee we have encouraged 10 residents to date to start recycling and are working with the hauler and our waste collection office to improve signage. The need for concise and clear education about the rules stood out most during meetings. We are creating a dry/erase board magnet with symbols and text for residents to keep as a reference. Most importantly we will continue attending the neighborhood meetings and working together to meet the needs of the community.

Educators

Our office hosted two professional development educator workshops for First and Second Grade Teachers that work with free and reduced lunch students in Alachua County. Children from families with incomes at or below 185 percent of the poverty level are eligible for free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch through the National Free and Reduced Lunch Program. It is our hope that providing teachers more information about waste management and reduction in our community, they will incorporate the information into their classroom and students would go home and share what they are learning with their families.

The workshops were correlated to state education standards for Science, Language Arts, Math, Social Studies and Art. Teachers spent the day participating in hands-on activities that embraced the concepts of Recycle, Reduce, Reuse and Rethink. The highlight of each workshop was a visit by our local enviro-hero, The Waste Watcher, and a tour of our Transfer Station to see what happens to all our garbage! Teachers left with an embrace zero waste kit including grade appropriate literature books, resources for activities and an activity guide. In the new year we’ll contact the workshop participants evaluate if and how the kits are being used with students and ways we can better assist teachers in reaching their education objectives for their students.

Gardening



One part of embracing zero waste is to compost. Compost is taking organic matter such as banana peels, coffee grinds and green leaves and putting them in a wire bin and letting decomposition take place to turn the materials into fertilizer for vegetable gardens and plants. We partnered with the Florida Organic Growers and Consumers, Inc. (FOG) to reach residents through gardening. One of FOG’s programs is the Gainesville Initiative for Tasty Gardens. Raised-bed vegetable gardens are built for free for low-income residents and the community centers that serve them, helping them become more self-sufficient by increasing their ability to provide for some of their own food needs. Our office provides wire compost bins, kitchen keepers (indoor bucket for holding compost scraps before taking outside) and education materials to the recipients. To date we have given away 73 compost bins and 66 kitchen keepers to recipients since September 2009. The next step is in evaluating the use of the compost bins by recipients and working with FOG to provide more compost education to recipients.

In all this has been a rewarding fellowship period. I am eager to continue these projects and expand them to other sections of the community. I’ll post follow-up images and information in the next couple months.

Written by:
Jennifer Seitz
jseitz@alachuacounty.us
2008 TogetherGreen Fellow