Even without a student in my household, I can feel the excitement of going back to school this year. Stores stocked with classroom supplies, hearing the neighborhood high school band practice, seeing the buses practicing their routes. New schedules, new habits, new opportunities. The new school year holds so much potential for growth, change, and learning.
Over the years, schools have stepped up to ensure students have access to healthy meals. However, this can lead to unnecessary waste, both of food and money, to the tune of approximately 530,000 tons of food waste and $1.7 billion across the nation annually, according to the 2019 World Wildlife Fund Food Waste Warriors report.
Students toss school food items for various reasons. Many schools’ schedules cannot accommodate the recommended 25 minutes of seated lunch time, resulting in students not having enough time to eat. In schools where recess is held after lunch, some students will forego eating in order to get to the playground more quickly. Sometimes the food is unfamiliar to students, or isn’t something that they like. These things, and others, all add up to a lot of school food waste.
Fortunately, there are many benefits to addressing food waste in schools. Involving students in that process can spark leadership, responsible care and valuing of resources, and caring for others. Share tables can support students and families facing food insecurity and reduce food costs. Separating out liquids and putting them down the drain instead of in the trash reduces messes, labor, and potential injuries from lifting heavy trash bags filled with liquid – a major win for the custodial staff!
Our work in schools has shown that there are a few easy things that schools can do to significantly reduce food waste and have a big impact on the planet, the community, and finances.
- Implement Offer v. Serve. The National School Lunch and Breakfast programs allow food service providers to offer students a selection of items when creating a meal to improve nutrition and reduce waste through student choice. This is required for all high schools, but optional for elementary and middle schools. Encouraging all schools to implement this practice can help students have access to more food they will eat, and reduce waste.
- Implement a share table. Share tables are specific locations where students can place unopened and unwanted items for other students to take for consumption. Schools that do not contract out its food service can return items remaining at the end of the meal period to the kitchen and reserve them if they have been held at the appropriate temperatures or provide them to students at other points in the day. For schools that contract out food service, surplus food left at the share table at safe temperatures can be made available to students throughout the day or in afterschool programming, or be donated. This uses food as it was intended – to feed students!
- Separate liquids. Liquid waste tends to be a large percentage of trash weight, especially in elementary schools. Having a bucket that extra milk can be poured into and then poured down a drain reduces trash weight and mess, all while saving the planet.
If you are connected to a school already doing these things, we’d love to hear about it – please send us a note about what you are doing! If not, we hope you will try one of these things to reduce food waste in schools. The beginning of the school year is a great time to try these things as everyone is settling into new routines. Need help or want to level up? Feel free to reach out – we’d love to talk about what can be done in your school!
