End School Food Waste!
Interested in helping your school reduce its environmental footprint? Link up with the Environmental Research and Education Foundation's SCrAP (School Cafeteria Discards Assessment Program). The org makes it easy for you to download a protocol and get started measuring and tracking your school's food waste.
Did you know that an estimated 40% of the food produced in America each year is thrown away? This is a loss of approximately $165 billion worth of food. WOW!! The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently establish a goal to divert at least 50% of food waste away from landfills by 2030. This goal will be accomplished both by reducing food waste and to diverting unused food to other uses.
There’s a lot of interest in learning how much food in school cafeterias is being thrown away. SCrAP has created a program with three levels that enables you to conduct a cafeteria audit to help with creating a strategy to meet the larger food waste reduction goal. You can choose your level of participation:
Purple - in which you answer a questionnaire about your school’s waste management practices.
Blue - in which you answer the questionnaire and weigh the cafeteria waste bins 3-5 times.
Gold - in which you complete the questionnaire and weigh the cafeteria waste bins 6-10 times.
How do I get started? Go to the SCrAP (School Cafeteria Discards Assessment Program) Website.
What is the time commitment? The time commitment varies depending on the level of participation that you choose. In addition, if you expand the narrative arc by petitioning the school to reduce their food waste footprint it will of course take a lot more time.
How should I expand this narrative arc? This is an easy first step towards making change in your school community. Make sure you follow up this measuring based project with a more impactful project to actually educate and reduce food waste.
See our Food Waste To Feed post on helping your school and community reduce food waste and turn what is produced into animal feed.
Start a regular on-site composting program at your school. Finished compost can be used in school gardens or for school and community landscaping. Find out if there’s a composting non-profit near you that can help with some of the brainstorming and execution. Talk to local waste management and cafeteria workers. Have your school contract with a commercial composter who will pick up organic food waste and then divert it to larger composting operations.
Vermicompost! That means ‘use worms to create compost’. Create a low-cost worm bin at your school. Add small amounts of fruit and vegetable waste and watch the worms turn the material into vermicompost, which is the best type there is. Use the compost in the school garden.
Embark on a scientific research project to see how you can convert your school cafeteria food waste to biofuel. This is an impressive one!
Hot Tip: This is a fantastic extra-curricular if you expand on it as described in the bullets above to go on and actually effect change in your school through composting, animal feed creation or biofuel creation. And download our PDF for tips on other issues that you’ll need to consider in launching a project like that. It will be time-consuming but also very impressive. Do it!