Earth Club Rising: GISS Students Turning Waste Into Action
Prepared by Transition Salt Spring’s Lighter Living Initiative
Trash talks! What we throw away speaks volumes about us as individuals and as a society. That’s why, on Tuesday, April 21, Earth Club students at Gulf Islands Secondary School piled high a day’s worth of school garbage, right inside the main doors.
The students have the full support of school administration, all of whom have been listening to high school students advocating for a compost and recycling program for years, which is consistent with the BC Ministry of Education’s 2010 Sustainable School Best Practices Guide which advocates for school wide recycling and composting systems. Despite this, options for responsible disposal don’t exist. The only bins available at GISS might as well be labelled Landfill. With assistance from the custodial staff, students collected and sorted through one day’s collection from all the “garbage bins” in the school. Featured in Tuesday’s trash pile: recyclable plastic, food waste (banned in BC landfills since 2015), aluminum cans, paper and cardboard. Outside the cafeteria, whatever is tossed into a “trash bin” on school grounds is collected, loaded into a truck and shipped to Washington State. No one has been able to tell students what happens to the trash after that.
At elementary schools on Salt Spring Island, a “pack it in, pack it out” approach is taken. Staff supervise children who are expected to eat at desks and pack away wrappers or food waste to bring home. Outdoor snacking is against the rules, and in this way, our island’s elementary schools can largely avoid a waste management problem. This varies on other gulf islands. Earth Club member Finn Bryant, grew up on Galiano and describes the comprehensive composting and recycling programs from his elementary school days, as does Kaelyn Dennis from Pender Island who also came from a school that had comprehensive composting and recycling and is frustrated that GISS doesn’t have a system for either. Both the grade 12 students are determined to make change before they go off to University in the fall. Finn, who recently visited UBC noted the organized, well-labelled waste management stations visible everywhere on the Vancouver campus.
Once children reach Gulf Islands Secondary School, they’re no longer supervised at lunch. Allowed to wander and eat wherever they like, many leave campus to buy food in town, and like many of us out and about, they don’t carry lunchboxes in which to bring home packaging and peels for disposal. Each day, around 650 people attend the high school, making it the largest social hub on the southern Gulf Islands. Additionally, the school’s Cafeteria program makes approximately 350 meals a day, and while food waste within the cafeteria gets composted, when students or staff bin their scraps anywhere outside the cafeteria, it gets sent to Washington with the rest of the trash. Earth Club students expect better: they don’t believe the 650 staff and students should be expected to manage, store, transport, and responsibly dispose of their personal recyclables and food waste at home. And aren’t schools a great place to teach critical thinking and environmental responsibility? Why, then, doesn’t the school district recycle and compost?
As mentioned, students have been asking these questions for years, but this year, Earth Club students didn’t just approach school administration; they also reached out to the wider island community for support.
GISS Earth Club Member Alil'a explaining how easy it is to recycle. Photo taken by Christopher Roy
Earth Club students have been collaborating with Transition Salt Spring (TSS) for several years, from participating in hands-on restoration projects within the Hwmet’utsum (Mt. Maxwell) Creek Watershed to hosting school-based Clothing and Gift Swaps, so it was a no-brainer to reach out to TSS’s Lighter Living Lead Andria Scanlan in September 2025 with a very specific ask. Led by Grade 12 student Melody Silva, the group made their pitch. “We want advocacy training so that people will listen to us when we have important things to say about climate action. Then we want a composting and recycling system at GISS.”
From there, grant support from the Jacqueline Booth Memorial Fund for the Environment (held at the Salt Spring Island Foundation), the Raffi Foundation, and the Salt Spring Institute for Sustainability and Action was sourced to support the student-led project. TSS Contractor Fig Mulder was hired to co-coordinate the project along with Melody and the students. To date, the cohort of 20+ students have participated in three advocacy training sessions; communicated with school administration and district staff to better understand the trash situation; interviewed staff and students about a recycling program; created promotional videos; and organised awareness-raising campaigns like the Tuesday garbage sort and pile-up. The group has also reached out to the Capital Regional District, the Salt Spring Island Local Community Commission, the two main waste management companies both on and off island in order to understand the challenges involved with Industrial, Commercial and Institutional (ICI) waste management. Unlike individual households, Salt Spring businesses and institutions (including schools) are prohibited from contributing to the Rainbow Road Recycling Centre. It’s up to them to source and pay businesses from off island to come over by ferry, load waste, and truck it off-island and depending on which company is under contract the waste may go to any number of locations, fromSD 64, waste is sent to Washington State.
One day of "bin" waste sorted to piles of compost, recyclables and garbage by GISS Earth Club students as part of a call for a systemic Recycling and Composting program. The only garbage is the small pile front left bottom. Photo taken by Christopher Roy
Why are the students willing to go to so much trouble? “We are tired of inaction,” says Melody Silva, the student lead. “Climate advocacy is a responsibility that we all have to Earth, and this project is a way that we can make tangible change in a world where so many things are out of our control.”
Students are hopeful that their efforts will encourage the School District to work with local leadership and create systemic change. After all, it’s on the webpage “...Gulf Islands School District also intends to “Be a leader in environmental stewardship and sustainability” and to “cultivate the freedom to explore new ideas, take risks, and challenge the status quo,” with a commitment to “empower student agency, engagement, and voice.” The School District 64’s Strategic Direction document for 2024-2028 clearly states “We create sustainable practices and are responsible in our use of resources” and promises “to foster integrity and demonstrate responsibility, we ‘walk the talk.’”
The Earth Club, with support from custodial staff is now conducting a two-week waste audit. Students will be sorting through the school’s garbage bins daily to separate garbage from items that could be composted or recycled for display and measurement. They also have a subsequent school-wide pilot recycling project planned having acquired funding support from the Salt Spring Institute for Sustainability and Action to purchase 69 recycling bins at a discounted price from Mouat’s home hardware. Students are also in discussion with local representatives to the Capital Regional District, Islands Trust and members of Salt Spring Island Local Community Commission to explore their responsibility in reducing barriers in place for school recycling and composting as local government has a critical role and responsibility in waste management as well. ” Students plan to present their findings to local government representatives in addition to the SD 64 School board at their June meeting.
GISS Earth Club members are:
Melody Silva, Finn Bryant, Amelia Cunningham, Kaelyn Dennis, Donna De Roo, Axton Ellis, Ella Gariepy, Posey Hertzman, Cora Higgs, Nova Kovacevic, Avery Minkow, Clara Palmer Bazdresch, Artémise Parent, Alil’a Perlux de la I’o, Matteo Poerschke and Marissa Shirk.
