Birchwood Middle School

What is Lunchroom Waste made up of?

Chart 1 shows that most of lunchroom waste is food waste.

By sorting, recovering, recycling and composting, look at how much we have reduced the amount of waste going to the landfill!

Chart 2 shows the five waste components – Recoverable Food, Liquids, Recycling, Landfill and Food Scraps.

What categories of waste are the biggest?

In what ways can we reduce them?

Recovering Food at the Share Table & Refrigerator.

Perfectly good, unopened or untouched food gets collected on the share table. This food used to go to the landfill.

Using safe food handling guidelines, we collect and offer share table food to students who are still hungry and sometime local food pantries.

According to “Leftover Cuisine,” a food rescue organization, one meal is calibrated as 1.2 lbs. of recovered food.

Look at how many meals we have provided by recovering food at the share table!

 

Food Recovered: 987 lbs.
Meals Created: 822.17

Preventing Food from Getting Wasted.

In addition to composting tons of food waste and recovering thousands of pounds of perfectly good food, we need to stop wasting so much food!

Because when we waste food, we also waste the resources… the water, fertilizer and hard work. We also lose the forests we clear to grow the food and we get greenhouse gas emissions from farm machines, processing plants and trucks that transport food to market… only to be wasted.

The official U.S. Food Waste Reduction Goal is to reduce food waste by 50%. This will help limit the warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

So, to do our part in moderating the effects of climate change, we need to reduce the food we waste by 50%.

Annual Food Waste per student is a factor that allows us to track how much we reduce food waste.

Food Waste per Student = (Liquids + Food Scraps) x 180 days / School Enrollment

How much has your school reduced food waste? How close is your school to reaching the 50% reduction goal? In what ways can we continue to reduce food waste?

Environmental Impact

As we divert food waste from the landfill and reduce food waste per student, we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving resources.

We calculate these reductions in Metric Tons of C02  and we can how this improves the environment by using the Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator | US EPA .

Check out what your school is doing for the planet!

 

 

Food Waste Diverted: 3.68 MTCO2
Food Waste Prevented: 9.63 MTCO2
Food Waste Total: 13.32 MTCO2
What does this mean?
Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator | US EPA