Zero Waste Lunch: Getting Serious About Going Green

It happens to the best of us. Speeding through the supermarket, we grab the staples of the “kid lunch”: string cheese, small bags of chips and cookies, single serving applesauces and puddings, Lunchables. Uncrustables. Maybe a package of brown lunch bags, plastic spoons and paper napkins. It’s easy. It’s convenient. And sadly it’s, oh, so typical. But not if one school in Austin has its way.

Walk into many a school cafeteria in this country, and you’ll see kids settling down to those hastily packed lunches. By the end of the meal, each child has a small handful of garbage: chip bags, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, juice pouches. Every year, one child can produce an amazing 67 pounds of lunchtime trash per year. This, according to wastefreelunches.org, an internet site run by a group of “green” California moms who are getting the word out about the trash generated by the nation’s schools. Over a 13-year school career, the mounds of garbage produced by a single person can reach more than 870 pounds! How many plastic baggies does it take to produce a pile of trash that heavy? It’s a mind-boggling amount of waste being dumped into our landfills on a daily basis. By some estimates, an average size elementary school can generate more than 18,000 pounds of lunch waste every year.

A Better Way

Now envision another scenario. More than 300 elementary students opening those very same lunches. Their school has no hot lunch program, so everyone brings lunch from home. You might think they’d produce even more garbage than a public school that washes its plastic trays and metal silverware every day. Not so, if you look closely. You won’t see many throw-away baggies here. Instead, the kids pull their chips and sandwiches out of sturdy plastic containers. Even their cheese has been cut from a block, rather than unzipped from a shrink-wrapped sleeve. The cutlery is washable. The water bottles are reused day after day. That’s because these students attend Austin Discovery School (ADS), an innovative charter school that set the lofty goal of becoming the first school in the state of Texas to initiate and enforce a Zero-Waste Lunch Program. It’s a project that started with an idea to do better by our planet and to help lift the burden from our burgeoning landfills — one that that has ultimately crept into ever facet of this school’s daily routine and educated students about far more than recycling.

“It’s part of the philosophy of the school,” says Assistant Director Kate Holton. “We want our kids to become environmental stewards. We really want them to be aware of how much waste they produce as individuals.”

And the school fulfills that ideology in so many ways. On the 200-acre grounds of the old Austin State School, ADS offers students an intensive gardening science program. Children compost their daily apple cores and banana peels while the buildings collect and reuse rain water. Meanwhile, herbs and vegetables grow in the pizza garden. The school’s chickens are busy laying organic eggs to sell to the parents. Some of those parents even take the non-compostable food scraps to feed to their own pigs. It’s just one big happy ecosystem.

How It Works

After six months in action, Austin Discovery School’s program appears to be on the path to success. To track their progress, fifth and sixth graders are weighing each classroom’s lunch waste and incorporating the results into math lessons. The recycling bins are filling up, while fewer milk cartons and plastic forks are showing up in the trash. The compost pile is growing by the day and turning out rich and beautiful soil. But even with all the achievements, the school cannot yet claim victory.

“It does take a lot more effort. And it’s gonna take awhile,” Ms. Holton says. “We never anticipated that we [would] have zero waste by the end of the year. We’re a work in progress.”

Keturah Havey echoes that sentiment. She got the ball rolling on the whole project over the summer when she was President of the school’s Parent-Teacher Organization. She says while many of the new parents seem to be embracing the Zero-Waste Program with little effort, some of the old-timers are having a hard time changing their daily routine. It’s not uncommon for an upper-grade parent to tell her, “I still use Ziploc bags. I’m sorry!”

And that’s where education comes in. For this program to be successful, getting the kids and parents on board is essential. That’s how it began at ADS.

“We already have teachers that spend a lot of time educating kids about composting and recycling,” Ms. Havey says. “I just thought, ‘Well, let’s take it a step farther, and really try to push the education to the parents as well, so when they’re making the lunches, that we’re not creating waste. We’re not bringing waste into the school.’”

So that’s when the PTO got busy teaching students and parents about the changes they wanted to implement at the school. They gathered up old recycle bins no longer needed by the City of Austin and placed them in every classroom, along with trash cans and containers for recyclables of all kinds: compost, lunch waste, paper, cardboard, cans, glass and plastic. They put metal silverware in the classrooms and made sure the kids knew how to wash their dishes. They taught parents how to pack everything from sandwiches to popcorn in reusable plastic containers or biodegradable wrappings rather than throw-away plastic baggies. And they offered lunchboxes for sale, in partnership with Kids Konserve, an environmentally conscious company trying to move schools everywhere toward more sustainability by selling waste-free lunch kits. As an added bonus, ADS receives 10% of those sales.
“If [it’s] not easy for the teachers and the kids, it’s not gonna happen,” Ms. Harvey says. “Make it convenient, and then people just don’t have a choice.”

Austin’s Zero-Waste Initiaitive

While the Zero-Waste Lunch Program at ADS may have been the brainchild of the school’s PTO, it dovetails beautifully with another initiative in an equally progressive entity: the City of Austin. Some would say perfect timing, as Austin recently announced its desire to be a “Zero-Waste” city by 2040.

It’s a bold enterprise for any local government. But Austin’s city council is determined to get there. The city has set a timeline for achieving a 20% reduction in per capita solid waste disposal to landfills and incinerators by 2012, diverting 75% of waste from landfills and incinerators by 2020, and 90% by 2040. The city admits there may still be up to 10% of solid waste disposal after 2040, but this crusade is a lofty goal nonetheless.

The city already has replaced its small recycling bins with larger rolling carts. And curbside composting is on the horizon for residents and businesses, as Austin joins forward-thinking cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Boulder, Colorado by targeting the more than 70,000 tons of organic material that typically gets picked up by the town’s garbage trucks. Including the brush and yard trimmings that are already collected for recycling, this category of compostable waste accounts for more than half of the total refuse discarded by Austinites.

Reducing the collection of organic waste will not only extend the life of the city’s existing landfills, it will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Organic waste that is buried in a landfill produces methane gas as it decomposes in anaerobic conditions, a far more potent contributor to global warming than the carbon dioxide that is emitted by a typical oxygen-driven compost pile.

Add to that Austin’s plan to decrease carbon dioxide emissions by reducing trash incineration and cutting back on the transportation of garbage in fossil fuel-burning vehicles, and you have a city poised to become a leading force in the fight against climate change.

Another bonus? This initiative will create jobs. Austin’s Zero Waste Strategic Plan states that for every 10,000 tons of waste that goes to the landfill, only one job is created. But for the one million tons of waste generated each year in Austin, the potential to recycle much of that trash could result in over 1,800 jobs. A promising figure in shaky economic times.

Savings on a Small Scale

The City of Austin estimates that recovering and reusing large quantities of recyclable materials could result in a savings of $40 million annually. Likewise, the savings to a typical family’s pocketbook can also be considerable by implementing zero-waste policies on a much smaller scale.

A side-by-side comparison on wastefreelunches.org shows the substantial savings that can be had by packing a waste-free lunch over a disposable one. The website calculates the typical disposable lunch as costing $1.37 more each day than a waste-free lunch. Their analysis takes into consideration the cost of items like plastic spoons, paper napkins, individual serving cups of items like yogurt, and pre-made packages of crackers or vegetables with dip. Over the course of a year, the bottom line of buying individually packaged disposable foods can cost almost $250 more than utilizing foods bought in bulk. Those are tangible savings that can not only keep more money in the bank account, but can also keep tons of garbage out of the local dump.

Not to mention the “savings” to be had concerning the health of your children. Read the labels on the back of many convenience foods, and you’ll see an array of hard-to-pronounce words that mean nothing more than added colorings, flavorings, preservatives, sweeteners, salts and fillers that have no business in our kids’ bodies. Plainly, setting your child up for a healthier future is another incentive for taking the effort to switch to a more waste-free lunch.

Pay It Forward

And while saving money is a more immediate justification for packing a waste-free lunch, treading more lightly on the earth is the more lofty goal here. Concerned parents everywhere may feel that one lunch out of hundreds isn’t making a difference. But it can. In order to turn those baby steps into giant leaps that will have an impact far beyond a single household, one need look no further than the schools.

Implementing a Zero-Waste Lunch Program is an undertaking that requires a true community effort, starting from the top down. Kate Holton says to “start with the parents, with your PTO being very active and encouraging without demeaning.” Once the parents, teachers and school administration are on board, the recycling lessons can be integrated into every aspect of the kids’ school days, from using both sides of a piece of paper before tossing it in the recycle bin, to encouraging them to take their lunch leftovers home instead of throwing them away. Eventually, the students themselves will begin to drive the program and educate their own families about the importance of producing less trash.

“A lot of people don’t realize how much waste it is,” Ms. Holton says. “Making [it a] hands-on experiment where the children are kind of responsible for how much comes in, it makes a much bigger impact.”

It may take awhile to change peoples’ minds, but in the end, it’s worth it. Former PTO President Keturah Havey says, “There’s a lot of schools that recycle, but to actually have a Zero-Waste Initiative that’s really trying to create less waste and be mindful of it, is a step above.” And that’s a cause we can all get behind.

Want to challenge your child’ school to become a Waste Free Lunch zone?

If so, the Environmental Protection Agency has a bunch of great tips, posters and other activities to help schools, kids and parents make the switch. Get in on the act by logging on to www.epa.gov/osw/education/lunch.htm.

Don’t think you can do it? Check out wastefreelunches.org for a list of schools around the country that have gone waste free.

And if that doesn’t inspire you, log on to www.globalstewards.org/lunch.htm for some truly outrageous trash stats! You might just think twice before buying that juice box….