Learning to be green
More area students are doing their part to reduce waste
Months ago, the Columbus Gifted Academy cafeteria was tossing about 18 bags of garbage into the Dumpster daily.
Now, the school throws out, at most, a couple of trash bags thanks to efforts led by its students.
“A lot of stuff is out of our control, and that can make you feel kind of helpless,” said 13-year-old Amelia Harris, an eighth-grader. “You just have to take a step back and focus on what you can do to help and make a difference.”
For Harris and nine classmates, that meant creating a “green team” at the Short North school, which has about 450 students in grades 3-8.
The program is one example of how central Ohio students are working to reduce the waste they send to Franklin County’s landfill.
Many students are leading similar efforts around the nation.
On a recent Monday afternoon, a team of eighth-graders gave up recess to sort trash and uneaten food from lunch trays into bins marked for recycling and composting.
They set up a “share table,” where students set aside food they don’t want. Students with bigger appetites can take extra items, no questions asked, and the leftovers go into a school food pantry instead of the trash.
Older students now use compostable paper lunch trays instead of foam, and everyone sips from paper straws instead of plastic ones, which aren’t biodegradable. School officials made the changes with little added cost.
The Compost Exchange, a local company that offers curbside and dropoff composting, picks up buckets weekly at a discounted rate, funded by donations from the school’s PTA, said English teacher Laurel Murphy, the group’s adviser.
Some students cited 17-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg as their inspiration. Others said it just seemed like the right thing to do.
“Climate change is a big problem,” Safia Regis, 14, said.
Columbus was one of nine cities highlighted in a recent World Wildlife Fund report that featured the group’s efforts
At the end of the lunch period, eighth-graders, from left, Amari Green-king, Elizabeth Schrappe and Eve Greenwood tell classmates which bins are for trash and food waste.
to help reduce food waste in 46 school cafeterias nationwide in 2019, including four Columbus schools. The Switzerland-based nonprofit is the world’s largest conservation organization.
The fund’s sixmonth pilot program, Food Waste Warriors, included a math-andscience-based curriculum to help students understand the connections between food waste, natural resources and wildlife.
There are nearly 100,000 schools serving lunches to nearly 30 million students daily in the U.S., the report said.
Annual school waste nationwide totals 530,000 tons of food
and 45 million gallons of milk, a total of $1.7 billion lost, the report estimated. That much decomposing food emits 1.9 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.
On average, each student at participating schools produced about 39 pounds of food waste and 29 cartons of milk waste per year, the report said.
In the four participating Columbus schools — Maize, Lindbergh and Ecole Kenwood French Immersion elementary schools and the Columbus City Preparatory School for Girls — food waste was 35 pounds and milk waste was 32 cartons.
After the program, which used tactics like those implemented recently at Columbus Gifted Academy, schools reduced food waste by an average of 3% and milk waste by 12%.
The participating Columbus schools diverted more than half of their usual lunch waste to compost, the report said.
The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, the public agency that operates Franklin County’s landfill, received a $40,000 grant from the World Wildlife Fund and the Kroger Co. Foundation to support the Columbus City Schools program, including pay for vendors that documented food waste and collected it.
Hanna Greer-brown, SWACO spokeswoman, said helping local schools reduce waste and increase recycling and composting is a high priority.
SWACO also contributed $9,000 of its own to fund compost programs at three of the four participating schools and at Devonshire Elementary.
Hilliard City Schools received $32,000 from SWACO last year for districtwide recycling bins. Columbus Gifted Academy’s students said a visit to Hilliard’s Horizon Elementary inspired them, because of its successful composting program.
All 14 of Hilliard’s elementary schools, two sixth-grade schools and one middle school are now composting, said Cliff Hetzel, the district’s business director. The program, supported by a separate $25,000 SWACO grant, redirected 100 pounds of food waste and reduced trash-hauling at those buildings by 40% last year, Hetzel said.
Windermere Elementary in Upper Arlington also received $500 to replace its recycling bins from SWACO.
In addition to awarding grants, SWACO has hosted nearly 10,000 students and their teachers for landfill tours and has free educational resources online for schools, Greer-brown said.
Columbus Gifted Academy’s green team hopes to create some of its own resources, including a video, to teach younger students how to carry on their efforts after its members head to high school in the fall.
“One of the biggest challenges was trying to get everyone used to the change, because we’ve been doing the same thing for years,” 14-year-old Jaevonte Allen said. “Now, we’re leaving our positive mark on the school.”