Up to 40 percent of food served in schools goes to waste — about 530,000 tons.
All that food waste has serious consequences for the planet: It translates into some 1.9 million metric units of greenhouse gases per year, according to a new report from the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund.
But there are solutions. Since 2018, World Wildlife Fund has worked with schools to educate students about food waste, train staff, help them adopt practices like using “share tables” and composting, and more.
I recently spoke with Gerin Hennebaul, a STEM content specialist at Lovin Elementary in Gwinnett County, Georgia, about her school’s experience reducing food waste. Lovin got help from World Wildlife Fund’s Food Waste Warriors program as well as the group Gwinnett Clean & Beautiful and its schools partnership, Green & Healthy Schools. The results have been impressive: Lovin Elementary has reduced food waste by some 70 percent, with each of its students participating and learning to divert food from landfills and to compost. The school even uses the program to help students practice math skills, spend time outside, and learn problem solving and communication skills.
Kids are often picky eaters, school budgets are tight and staff are stretched thin. Hennebaul told me that before Lovin Elementary tackled food waste, kids were throwing away vast amounts of food — unopened milk cartons and juice containers, bags of carrots or apples. But Hennebaul’s experience offers reasons for optimism. Her main advice for other schools: start by collecting data on the problem, and go slow. Below is my interview with her, which has been condensed and edited for clarity.
This all started with a food audit in late 2018. What is a food audit and what did it find?
Before we could start taking care of the problem, we had to get some data to figure out what it was. We’d heard of the Food Waste Warrior food audit from Green & Healthy Schools. They gave us all the supplies we needed — buckets for food collection, the scales to weigh the food, all the signage.
We set up two tables down the exit of our cafeteria and lined up on both sides and had our third graders and fifth graders help. As the kids finished their lunches that day, they would bring their trays to the table. And then our students were almost in an assembly line. One would take the fruits and vegetables off the tray and dump them in a bucket. The next person would dump all the extra milk. The next person would pull off all the plastic.
Gathering that data at the beginning is something every school should start with. The day we did this was Taco Day, so it was gross, there was lots of runny cheese, but we learned a lot. We collected 589 pounds of waste. Of that, 120 pounds were foods called recoverables — sealed cartons of milk, bags of carrots, of apples.
How did you use that information?
The kids were shocked by the numbers. We asked them for solutions and brainstormed ideas. They started off simple, like making posters, which they did. They went on the announcements and spoke to everybody about how you don’t have to take a milk if you are not going to drink it.
Then they came up with two other ideas. One was a share table. We looked at all the foods that hadn’t been touched and asked, ‘What can we do with all these foods?’ And they said, ‘We can share with other people.’ We reached out to Green & Healthy Schools and they helped us get a share table started. We have a table with baskets on it and a refrigerator with a glass front door.
The other thing they weighed that day was food from the teachers’ salad bar. We had just gotten chickens in our garden, and they came up with the idea of feeding the lettuce and cucumbers and things like that to the chickens. We implemented their ideas for a few months and in March 2019 we did another food audit and we reduced our lunch waste to 435 pounds of waste, 47 pounds of that were fruit and vegetable waste, and we sent 108 pounds of food to the share table that day. It was really cool for the kids to see that their ideas were really working. That’s how our first year started.
What came next? You’ve reduced food waste by 70 percent – how did you achieve that?
We’d been talking about what more we could do, and around the fall of 2021, Green & Healthy Schools reached out to us and said, Are you interested in a composting grant? We received this grant from Food Well Alliance and they built our composting bin. I didn’t know anything about composting, neither did the kids. My favorite part of everything we’ve done has been learning to do all of this with the kids. When they realize the teacher doesn’t know what they are doing, they will go research it themselves, find out the answers and be happy to tell you exactly what they found out.
We started really small, in the spring of 2022, with fifth grade. We’d learn about composting, teach them lessons, they would collect food scraps, and a couple weeks later we’d move on to the next class. In fall 2022, we decided to expand to all grade levels except kindergarten. By the end of the year, every student, first through fifth grade, knew how to collect food waste and compost. During that year, 2022-2023, we collected 1,235 pounds of fruit and vegetable waste from our trays. Then in 2023-2024, from the second week of school, all first through fifth graders began collecting fruit and vegetable waste, and we collected 5,489 pounds of food waste that year. We ran out of room in our compost bin so now we work with the local church across the street; they take our food waste two days a week for their garden. And teachers have vermicomposting [or worm composting] bins in their classrooms.
I was struck in the report by the idea of ‘cafeterias as classrooms.’ Are there math lessons involved, for example?
The very last group of kids that eat in the cafeteria is fourth grade, and when they finish at 1 o’clock, two kids from every single class — and we rotate every week — wheel the cart and weigh all the food waste. And they have a binder where they document all of their data. And at the end of the week they add up the data, so they are adding with decimals, and that’s one of their fourth grade standards.
Every single Tuesday, during recess time, we have a master gardener who comes to Lovin, and he takes a group of four or five fourth graders and they go to the compost bin and they take the temperature of the compost and track the heat all year long. They learn how to physically do the composting. We have an eco heroes club for our second and third graders and they use the compost in our garden. Our kindergarteners plant carrots every winter. Our third graders just used it for their unit on soil.
Our third graders focus on reducing, reusing, recycling. We talk about Food Waste Warriors, we pull out that data. Then each third grade class does a presentation to the kindergartners where they talk about chickens, share tables, and composting. They all write original songs about reducing waste, have skits, create this big PowerPoint presentation. It’s very cool to have the third graders be the teachers. Every August, our first graders that received the lessons in May as kindergarteners remember the most because the third graders were teaching them.
Do you connect what you’re doing to carbon emissions or to climate change? When does that happen?
We start talking about that in third grade. We try to align it with as many standards as we can, and third grade is the heaviest on pollution, recycling and landfills. We also talk a lot about it with our fifth graders before they go off to middle school, because we are hoping that a lot of them will want to start these programs on their own.
Have you used the data you’ve collected to make decisions about ordering and meal choices?
Back in January 2025, we launched something called Raccoon Eyes AI. A student at Georgia Tech created this system that when you scan your tray, it takes a picture, and AI analyzes what you’re throwing away. Every month we get a printout of what our students are throwing away. It tells how many clean trays we had, how many trays still had food on them, how much trash each grade level threw away, and what we are throwing away, like 81 pounds of boneless wings. We get pictures of the top three throwaway items. It’s almost like doing a food audit every day. But he sold the company and we’re in limbo now.
Based on the data there are some things we can easily do. We had two types of rolls one day and our kids threw away like 150 of one and only like 30 of another. The reason was that they liked the type that had more garlic sauce. That’s something we can change, we can add more garlic sauce. But when it gets to the district level, that’s a whole other ball game because we have vendors we have to use. We have freedom to put more teriyaki sauce on something, but we can’t change what type of nuggets we order.
What are the biggest barriers keeping this from expanding to more schools? How can they be overcome?
At Lovin when I first started this, I sat down with our administrative team, cafeteria manager and head custodian. When the cafeteria manager and head custodian see that your admin team and everybody is on board, that really seems to help. One of the biggest things is my position. I am a “fully release” teacher, which means I don’t have a homeroom or classes. That gives me the flexibility and freedom to go out and work at the compost bin with the kids, or be in the cafeteria and stand by that share table for two hours for the first week of school to make sure everybody is using it correctly. Schools that don’t have that seem to struggle a little bit more with the consistency and the level of how we do it here at Lovin. The hardest logistic, which we have no control over really, is the weather. If it’s pouring down rain, we can’t compost. We have worked around a lot of those things, which is good, but there are always going to be new hurdles to figure out.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about food waste was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.
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