Over the last decade, I’ve worked closely with Montréal educators and students to better understand how climate change education occurs in schools — and how climate change curricula and policies shape everyday experiences there.
In 2019, as part of a wider climate action plan, Montréal ambitiously committed to transitioning to zero waste by 2030.
With hopes of further reducing landfill waste, 22 schools across four school boards in Montréal were promised compost collection as part of the city’s zero-waste plan.
I interviewed three teachers from three different schools, one principal from another school and a school board employee to hear their analyses of how this program unfolded. The research suggests that to effectively expand composting and zero-waste climate action through schools, the labour of educators and other school workers must be factored into a “just transition.”
As a conceptual framework and practice, a “just transition” is an approach for connecting mechanisms of climate action with social fairness.
Importance of ‘just transition’
Montréal has goals to use a zero-waste model to reduce its emissions because food waste accounts for 15 to 20 per cent of emissions in the city. The aim is to ensure food waste is either being composted or that still-edible food finds its way to people experiencing food insecurity.
As communities grapple with climate change mitigation and adaption, efforts to realize global and local climate policy ambitions like zero waste are often premised upon the concept of a just transition.
Just transitions typically seek to reconcile environmental and social issues with a low-carbon and fossil-fuel-free future. Much of the research on just transitions encircles worker and labour rights from the energy, manufacturing, transport and related sectors as they move toward zero-emission outcomes.
My research points to teachers and other educational workers as key contributors for policy development toward a just transition. Because ecological and social crises are constructed and reproduced through power imbalances, a just transition away from fossil fuels and ecologically destructive practices also needs to be a departure from unequal and extractive ways of relating.
Zero waste by 2030?
During the pilot phase of the zero-waste plan’s implementation in schools, educational workers I partnered with stated they experienced a top-down policy implementation that created additional labour and misunderstandings while undercutting existing school composting programs and other established processes.
School board and city policymakers did not initially consider who would actually take on different compost-related tasks like sorting and transporting waste, and how this might intersect with labour relations and collective bargaining agreements.
As such, teachers and other school staff were compelled to take on additional and onerous tasks, such as organizing waste across the school, raising awareness and communicating with city workers.
For example, one participant said the only support and resources offered to their school by the city came in the form of two large composting bins and a short workshop on what goes into the city’s compost bins. They also felt there was an assumption that the compost would simply sort itself when someone needed to be present to ensure that organic matter ended up in the right place.
When the implementation of city-mediated school composting didn’t work well, some teachers intervened. In different schools, each having its own set of patterns, behaviours and peculiarities, varied responses emerged to the composting program.
One educator opted to work with the city on structuring the kind of compost support that would be pertinent for their school, while another motivated their students to participate during instructional time.
