Nathan Bishop's Food Waste Reduction Team!

What is Lunchroom Waste made up of?

  • Chart 1 shows that food waste represents most of the waste in the lunchroom.

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

  • Chart 2 shows the five components – Recoverable Food, Liquids, Recycling, Landfill and Food Scraps.
What categories of waste are the biggest?
In what way can we reduce them?

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

Using safe food handling guidelines, we collect share table food and offer it to students who are still hungry. Sometimes we donate it to 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: 1327.6 lbs.
Meals Created: 1105.89

But 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 loose the forests we clear to grow the food and we get greenhouse gas emissions from the farm machines, processing plants and trucks that transport the food to market… only to be wasted!

The official U.S. Food Waste Reduction Goal is 50% by 2030. This will help limit the warming of the earth 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 can calculate these reductions in Metric Tons of C02  and see what that means using the Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator | US EPA . Check out what your school is doing for the planet!

Food Waste Diverted: 2.28 MTCO2
Food Waste Prevented: 9.09 MTCO2
Food Waste Total: 11.37 MTCO2
What does this mean?
Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator | US EPA