Schools cut cafeteria food waste through composting and share tables

WWF estimates schools throw out 530,000 tons of food yearly, costing $1.7 billion

Students at Lovin Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, walk the cafeteria at lunch collecting apple cores, banana peels and grape stems in buckets destined for the school’s outdoor compost bin. Unopened milk cartons go into a shared refrigerator for other students to grab as a snack or take home, and uneaten salad scraps are dumped into the school’s chicken coop.

“Now there’s not a lot going to the landfill, and there’s not just scraps everywhere,” said Aissatou Brown, a student at the school. “And it feels like we’re saving the planet.”

Lovin, about 40 miles east of Atlanta, is one example of the many U.S. schools composting, using share tables and tailoring food choices to cut how much cafeteria food ends up in the trash. Public schools serve more than 30 million lunches each day, according to federal figures, and the vast majority come from the Agriculture Department’s National School Lunch Program. Experts say tons of cafeteria food is wasted each year, costing the schools and contributing to methane in landfills, and recovery, recycling and composting have cut that waste despite challenges.

Sometimes the solutions are as simple as picking better chicken nuggets, or using clear trash bags to make the waste more visible, said Carmen Byker Shanks, director of scientific strategy at the Center for Nutrition and Health Impact. “The reason why food waste might be happening in one school is probably different than other schools,” she said.

“When everybody’s at the table and the students are coming up with solutions, and the nutrition staff are responding to them, and the teachers are helping facilitate the conversations, I think those interventions have been pretty successful,” she added. “When we reduce food waste by helping kids eat more of their meal, we’re essentially supporting learning.”

Lovin, which serves around 900 students, conducted its first food audit in 2018 after receiving funding through the World Wildlife Fund’s Food Waste Warriors program. Students who sorted the cafeteria waste found 589 pounds of discarded food during one two-hour lunch period, including 74 pounds of fruit and vegetable waste and 120 pounds of recoverable items, said Gerin Hennebaul, who leads agriculture and science initiatives at Lovin.

In response, students brainstormed announcements and posters to reduce waste, and Lovin introduced a designated table and refrigerator for sharing unopened cafeteria items. Food waste dropped by nearly one third in the school’s next food audit months later.

In fall 2021, Lovin received a grant for on-site composting. Students now collect and weigh their scraps, and the school’s master gardener takes them to the bin outdoors. Volume grew as composting expanded to each grade level, so Lovin built vermicomposting bins that use worms and began sharing its waste with Creative Enterprises, a local nonprofit, for use in the group’s garden.

It is not unusual for the school to compost around 100 pounds of produce waste in a week, and students often collect around 100 share table items each lunch. Shared items that go unclaimed by the end of the week stock Lovin’s food pantry for community members in need.

“Our cafeteria, it’s just really turned into another classroom and … they don’t realize they’re even learning, but they’re learning every day,” Hennebaul said. She said hearing children report that “we’re composting at our house now,” that they built a chicken coop at home or that their family brought items in for the food pantry has been “the biggest thing,” and that she wants to see the effort happen in “other schools all over.”

Many schools in Baltimore City Public Schools, a district serving more than 76,000 students, have share tables, and some have composting. The district’s biggest initiative is a 33-acre learning farm that encourages students to be less wasteful by teaching them about what resources go into making food.

“It’s not really fair to expect students to be curious or excited about fruits and veggies in their cafeteria or healthy options in the cafeteria in general, if they’ve never really had a hands-on experience to interact with fruits and vegetables, harvesting, planting, tasting them right out of the ground,” said Anne Rosenthal, a farm-to-school specialist for the district. She said many students are familiar with environmental justice issues and pollution, so reducing waste hits close to home. “We see this as a really important step in empowering students to be part of the solution, and we’ve seen them pick it up really, really quickly in the cafeterias,” she said.

Baltimore City Public Schools is also a participant in the Food Waste Warriors program, which is one of the larger independent resources helping schools fight food waste. The World Wildlife Fund program has worked with more than 1,000 schools, and it says that some have cut waste by as much as 70%. In 2019, the group analyzed the food waste of 46 schools in eight states and used the data to estimate that schools nationwide could be wasting about 530,000 tons of food per year, costing them $1.7 billion, though it acknowledged it was extrapolating from a small sample of schools.

The Agriculture Department also provides resources for schools to reduce waste, and many of its approaches overlap with those used by the schools in Baltimore and Lawrenceville. Its website includes guides for conducting food waste audits, creating share tables and giving students greater choice; other tips include scheduling recess before lunch and extending lunchtime. A department spokesperson said in an email that it also recommends schools reassess how they buy and prepare food to reduce waste.

School budgets can be a barrier to implementing new strategies, with administrators already facing tough choices on teacher salaries and classroom materials. Composting, especially when required under some state laws, might also necessitate extra staff. Districts are also bound by federal requirements for well-balanced meals and food safety rules, which experts say are important but which can lessen flexibility in trying new approaches.

“There’s a ton of constraints and a ton of reasons why this doesn’t get a lot of attention,” said Pete Pearson, a World Wildlife Fund vice president. He said the current cafeteria setup doesn’t always prevent children from throwing edible food away, even as millions of children are food insecure across the nation. Bringing students into the process is a key part of the solution, he said.

“The more that we involve the students in this whole journey, the more it’s just going to really light up,” Pearson said.