The Parent Green Team at Paideia School in Druid Hills wasn’t satisfied with simply recycling plastic utensils and containers for turkeys, mashed potatoes and green beans from the school’s traditional Thanksgiving feast.

They demanded zero waste.

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Rich Addicks/ raddicks@ajc.com

Paideia School’s Thanksgiving isn’t just about a meal. As part of the entertainment, Hunter Furman, 7 (left), and other members of her second-grade class sing their own Turkey Day song.

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Rich Addicks/raddicks@ajc.com

First-grader Emma Schwartz, 6, eats off a plate made of sugar cane and corn instead of environmentally unfriendly plastic.

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Rich Addicks/Staff

Catherine Heckler, 3, who is in Paideia’s half-day program, drops her plate in a corn-based bag destined to end up in a compost heap, not a landfill.

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This year, about 1,000 students, teachers and alumni on Wednesday shared all the trappings of America’s favorite meal — including 23 turkeys — without sending one garbage bag to a landfill.

Think about that.

Not one garbage bag.

Tania Herbert, the parent leader who pushed for a no-trash Thanksgiving, was disappointed when she discovered a landfill-destined item she’d forgotten: the latex gloves worn by student servers. And someone stuck plastic turkeys in the cupcakes.

So call it a “Nearly Zero Waste Thanksgiving Feast,” with the exception of a zip-top bag full of latex gloves and plastic turkeys.

“We have to figure out how we can be hygienic and be environmentally friendly,” said Herbert, who lives in Oakhurst and has sons in ninth and 12th grades.

Three years ago, when Herbert introduced the idea, the school’s feast generated about 100 bags of garbage. Last year the pile was down to seven bags.

The trick to getting down to zero was using utensils, plates and cups made from sugar cane and corn, and finding a place to compost it all, along with the food waste. When students finished eating, they dropped everything in trash cans lined with corn-based green garbage bags — also compostable.

About 50 bags were hauled to a 32-acre field in Barnesville, about 50 miles south of Atlanta. Greenco Environmental recently became the first food-waste composting operation permitted by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

Greenco’s founder, Tim Lesko, has a simple recipe. He mixes one part food waste with three parts yard waste, then lets “nature do its work.” In about 90 days, bacteria will have broken down the material to create what Lesko hopes will be a marketable form of organic fertilizer that can be sold to farmers and plant nurseries.

Lesko donated his new company’s service to the private school.

Despite instructions from teachers, many students were reluctant to throw everything in the same trash bag.

“I’m not sure what to do with this,” said senior Paul Lane, holding his plate and cup. He was told to “throw it all away.”