‘The kids love doing it, especially elementary students.’
Originally published by ecoRI News, a nonprofit newsroom covering environmental news in Rhode Island. Read more at ecoRI.org
PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island’s 450 or so public and private schools generate a lot of food waste, nearly 28,000 pounds every school day, according to more than a dozen food-waste audits conducted by a local nonprofit.
Among the food wasted daily is some 4,000 pounds of milk, fruit, granola bars, yogurt, baby carrots, and other sustenance that is unopened and perfectly edible.
Here are some other findings from the Rhode Island School Recycling Project’s 15 lunch audits:
About 5 million pounds, some 2,500 tons, of school food scrap is sent to the Central Landfill in Johnston every year. Of that, some 750,000 pounds is edible.
Each high school student generates an average of 0.23 pounds of food waste daily, and 41 pounds every school year.
Each middle school student generates an average of 0.39 pounds of food waste daily, and 70 pounds every school year.
Each elementary school student generates an average of 0.48 pounds of food waste daily, and 86 pounds every school year.
The Rhode Island School Recycling Project was co-founded in 2001 by James Corwin, in partnership with the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) and the state Department of Environmental Management, to improve school recycling. At that time, the number of schools recycling properly was 18%, which was among the lowest in New England. Today, it is close to 70%.
The nonprofit quickly incorporated diverting cafeteria food from the state’s waste stream into its work. That’s where much of the Project’s focus is now centered, and considerable changes to reduce food waste have been made in the participating schools.
The nonprofit’s mission is to reduce, recover, and recycle to help protect the environment and develop the next generation of environmentalists through project-based learning, according to Corwin.
Currently, there are 21 schools participating in the Project’s waste-reduction efforts. Since its inception, the program has diverted nearly 150 tons of food and food scrap from the Central Landfill, according to Corwin.
The cost per school is about $5,000 annually. The Project pays for the first year, and buys participating schools a refrigerator to store recovered food. Students can take food from the refrigerator when they are hungry.
“So we’re saying to custodians, listen, when you see that that dumpster is only half full let’s talk to the facilities director about reducing the amount of pickups to, you know, instead of one a day, one every other day, so that you can offset the cost of the organics hauling,” Corwin said. “Because we want to make this cost neutral for schools.”
The Project’s program starts with an educational presentation by RIRRC, which operates the Central Landfill, about the many problems associated with food waste. Corwin and Warren Heyman, the nonprofit’s organizing director, then visit the participating school to discuss what the students learned during the RIRRC presentation and start training them, and staff, on a new waste-sorting system.
Participating students — in groups called Green Teams in middle school and Cafeteria Rangers in elementary school — go to lunch early so they can spend the last 8 minutes of the period managing the station and making sure everything is sorted correctly. There’s usually four to five students working a sorting station.
“The kids love doing it, especially elementary students,” Corwin told ecoRI News during a recent online interview. “They love getting in that sorting line and telling kids where everything goes. And, you know, they lobby their principal to be a cafeteria manager.”
Each station features a “share table” that repurposes uneaten food. On the table is a cooler where students place leftover perishable items such as milk and yogurt. There’s a basket for leftover fruit. These provisions are then moved to the refrigerator.
A 5-gallon bucket is where students pour out leftover milk. There’s a compost bin for food scrap and a recycling bin for milk cartons and plastic bottles. A landfill bin holds the trash that can’t be eaten, composted, or recycled.
The compostable material is picked up weekly by one of two local composting outfits — Black Earth Compost or Bootstrap Compost.
After all the sorting is done, the landfill gets “surprisingly very little,” according to Corwin. “It gets wrappers and straws and plastic spoons and plastic bags,” he said.
Heyman noted that after Richmond Elementary School implemented the Project’s waste-reduction system, cafeteria trashed was reduced from eight bags a day to one. He also noted that the state Department of Education has been a supportive advocate of the Project’s work.
Nearly 1 in 3 Rhode Island households can’t afford adequate food, according to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. At current disposal rates, the Central Landfill has 23 years left, according to a 2015 report.
“Diverting it is good for compost and good recovery, and feeding hungry people is better,” Corwin said. “But the best thing is just reducing it, stopping it before it happens.”
About 40% of U.S. food is wasted, either buried or incinerated. In schools, the amount of wasted food increases. A 2019 study of school cafeteria waste found that 27% to 53% of the food served was thrown away. Another study has estimated that U.S. schools waste some 530,000 tons of food annually — about 39 pounds of food and 29 cartons of milk per student per year — costing $1.7 billion nationally.
“When we aggregate all of our schools to date, we can say that we are reducing the amount of waste coming out of lunchrooms going to the landfill by 87 percent,” Corwin said.
Note: Last year on an ecoRI News Blab Lab Podcast reporters Colleen Cronin and Rob Smith spoke to Jim Corwin and Warren Heyman about the ABCs of food waste in schools.
