Buckets, chickens and worms: Schools reduce cafeteria food waste through compost, shared tables

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) — At Lovin Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, students play with their food. Sort of.

Some walk around the cafeteria with buckets collecting leftover lunch scraps. These apple cores, banana peels and grape stems ultimately head to Lovin's outdoor compost bin. Others put unopened milk in a shared refrigerator for students to grab as a snack or take home. Uneaten salad scraps are dumped into the school's chicken coop.

Lovin Elementary, 40 miles (64 kilometers) 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.

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

Public schools serve more than 30 million lunches each day, according to federal figures. The vast majority come from the Agriculture Department's National School Lunch Program. But experts say tons of cafeteria food is wasted each year, costing the schools and contributing to methane in landfills . Recovery, recycling and composting have cut 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 cafeteria waste found 589 pounds (267.2 kilograms) of discarded food, including 74 pounds (33.6 kilograms) of fruit and vegetable waste and 120 pounds (54.4 kilograms) of recoverable items during one two-hour lunch period, said Gerin Hennebaul, who leads agriculture and science initiatives at Lovin.

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

In fall 2021, Lovin received a grant for on-site composting. Now, students collect and weigh their scraps, and Lovin’s master gardener takes them to the bin outdoors.

Volume grew as composting was expanded to each grade level, so Lovin built vermicomposting bins — using worms — and began sharing its waste with a local nonprofit, Creative Enterprises, for use in its garden.

Shared items that are unclaimed at the end of the week now stock Lovin’s food pantry for community members in need. Now, it’s not unusual for Lovin to compost around 100 pounds (45.4 kilograms) of produce waste in a week, and students often collect around 100 share table items each lunch.

“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. “Hearing the kids come in and say, ‘we’re composting at our house now,’ or ‘we built a chicken coop at our home,’ or ‘hey, my family brought in XYZ for the food pantry today’ ... that’s been the biggest thing, and we want to see this 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.

Its biggest initiative is a 33-acre (13.4-hectare) 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.

The district 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, WWF 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 (480,807.5 metric 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 the 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 spokesperson for the department 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. Experts say those rules are important but 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 kids 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, Pearson said.

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

Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn . Reach her at ast.john@ap.org .

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