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On the Ground With Atlanta Schools Reducing Food Waste

In 2016, Carla Harward’s daughter, Sophie, got here residence from her center college in Chattooga County and instructed her mom about two college students who hadn’t eaten over the weekend. 

“I used to be surprised,” says Harward. “Sophie mentioned the little boys had been crying as a result of their bellies damage. We simply had no thought there have been children in our neighborhood that had been hungry.” Harward and a few households gathered meals for the household, however she knew extra needed to be executed. 

It was her daughter who talked about all of the meals going to waste at her college and requested her mother a easy query: Why couldn’t they offer households the meals from her college as an alternative of throwing it away?

Sophie’s thought grew to become the spark that launched the Georgia nonprofit Helping Hands Ending Hunger, which now works with 150 colleges all through the state to divert meals waste.

Serving to Palms Ending Starvation. Pictures courtesy of Carla Harward.

And there’s numerous meals going to waste. A 2019 USDA School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study discovered that 31 % of greens and 41 % of milk had been tossed.

However these figures are altering. Faculties in Atlanta are working to feed hungry households and rethink how they strategy college meals. Listed below are three making enormous environmental impacts.

Serving to Palms Ending Starvation

Harward thought her daughter’s thought to repurpose the meals children didn’t eat sounded easy, however the USDA has strict guidelines on stopping chilly cafeteria meals from being saved. 

However Harward wasn’t deterred. In 2016, she fashioned a 501(c)(3) and examined the pilot in her daughter’s college. After lunches, college students collected uneaten prepackaged meals or dry items, comparable to apple sauce, packaged carrots, and unopened milk cartons. The scholars discovered how you can safely acquire and retailer the unused meals, after which handed it out weekly to households in want. 

In Georgia, that included greater than 13 % of kids who lacked entry to wholesome meals in 2022 (the newest numbers obtainable), in keeping with the nonprofit Feeding America

At this time, the Serving to Palms program is in 150 Georgia colleges and is run by college students. “We now practice volunteers and faculty employees at each college chapter to show children that meals will not be trash,” says Harward.

Serving to Palms Ending Starvation. Pictures courtesy of Carla Harward.

College students at Atlanta Public College’s Springdale Park Elementary School (SPARK) STEAM program rescued about 700 kilos of meals between February and Could 2024 alone, in keeping with Harward. It was repurposed into 566 meals and one other 486 kilos of meals for the neighborhood. 

“Meals that may’t be saved is collected in compost buckets within the cafeteria and utilized in our [rooftop] garden; nothing goes to waste,” says Kristin Siembieda, STEAM program specialist and Serving to Palms coordinator at SPARK.

Harward says this system works extremely nicely. “These children are taking cost and are going to be wonderful future leaders.” 

A pupil weighs out meals for compost. Pictures courtesy of Gwinnett County Public Faculties.

Meals Waste Warriors

The scholars at Gwinnett County College’s Lovin Elementary have a warrior mentality in the case of meals waste. 

In 2018, Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful’s Green and Healthy Schools had a uncommon alternative to take part in a new initiative of the World Wildlife Fund, the Food Waste Warriors program.

A presentation by the Meals Waste Warriors. Pictures courtesy of Gwinnett County Public Faculties.

“The World Wildlife Fund was on the lookout for methods to gather information for its first meals waste report, and to assist write curriculum round how you can do meals waste audits,” says Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful board member Jay Bassett, who additionally works for the US Environmental Safety Company (EPA). “The Inexperienced and Wholesome Faculties program was already established [at Gwinnett County Schools], so we did it.” 

In 2019, Gwinnett County Faculties enlisted Lovin Elementary in Lawrenceville to be a part of the Meals Waste Warriors program, conducting meals waste audits. They sorted milk, fruits, and greens left on lunch trays into buckets and weighed all of it. They had been shocked that the varsity had trashed virtually 600 kilos of meals — in sooner or later. 

Accumulating meals for a waste audit. Pictures courtesy of Gwinnett County Public Faculties.

13 Gwinnett County Faculties accomplished the 31 food waste audits for the WWF’s Food Waste Warriors report. The information for Gwinnett County Faculties was eye-opening: On common, 95,169 kilos of meals per college, per 12 months was wasted, and 49.4 kilos of meals per pupil, per 12 months was wasted, in addition to virtually 56,000 cartons of milk per college, per 12 months.

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California’s meals restoration program is the primary of its sort within the nation.

The primary 31 audits launched the continued relationship with the WWF and Gwinnett County Faculties, which continues to give attention to Okay-12 schooling. At this time, the Meals Waste Warriors program is a vital a part of the Inexperienced and Wholesome Faculties and STEAM schooling inside Gwinnett County Faculties, which is the most important in Georgia.

“An important factor in regards to the Meals Waste Warrior program is the scholars deal with each side of the undertaking,” says Brenda McDaniel, environmental schooling supervisor, Gwinnett County Faculties. “It’s not nearly doing meals waste audits; the scholars should give you options to deal with the issues.”

That first student-led audit at Lovin Elementary offered the varsity with totally different resolutions it has now applied, together with serving meals in a different way to scale back packaging waste, eliminating straws and breakfast cutlery, and utilizing biodegradable trays.

Tending to the compost. Pictures courtesy of Gwinnett County Public Faculties.

Third-graders now acquire meals scraps that will be trashed on the finish of lunch and add them to the compost bin that’s a part of the Food Well Alliance’s Compost Connectors program. They find out about composting in STEAM lessons and how you can use it to fertilize their gardens and assist feed the varsity’s chickens.

First- and third-graders have improved their skillsets in science and math a lot, the county revised its center college curriculum to accommodate their new talents.

“I by no means envisioned the place this may go,” says Bassett. “We simply needed to alter coverage on how you can cut back waste in cafeterias. That led to systemically constructing this tradition round agriculture, nature-based studying, biology and engineering. Decreasing meals waste is only a small a part of it.”

Raccoon Eyes

Georgia Tech in Atlanta is synonymous with engineering, prestigious analysis and cutting-edge know-how. Quickly, its eating companies might be a frontrunner in what universities can do to chop down on meals waste of their eating halls, because of Tech college students Bruce Tan, Ivan Zou, and Nathanael Koh. 

The three college students targeted their CREATE-X Capstone, which is an undergraduate senior design course for entrepreneurial tasks, on decreasing meals waste on campus due to the quantity of meals being trashed within the college eating halls. Their resolution: Raccoon Eyes

“The attention-opener for me was a time I used to be within the kitchen on the finish of lunch service,” says Zou. “A employee pushed in carts filled with meals that had been going straight to the trash.” 

Tending to the varsity’s compost piles. Pictures courtesy of Gwinnett County Public Faculties.

Raccoon Eyes has two elements: 3D cameras and a pc display on the eating corridor trash cans. The 3D cameras take footage of each plate and calculate the sort and weight of meals waste going into the trash utilizing software program the three college students developed. The pc display makes use of visible and audio to gather suggestions in regards to the meals and to nudge college students about future meals waste.

Throughout the interval between Jan. 11 and Could 2, 2024, the system tracked and measured the quantity of meals waste on greater than 240,000 plates at Tech. Whereas there was nonetheless about an oz of meals left on every plate, the general quantity of meals being tossed dropped by 19 % throughout the semester.

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