Recipe for a Food Waste Project
Following are some of the steps I took to get my project going
- Rishi Leung
01
Getting permission and support from the meal staff and school administration
Before I started I was anxious about approaching the staff working on food preparation because I was not sure if they would be supportive. They are already very busy with their jobs and I would be adding more work. I also needed to talk to teachers and school administrators to get their permission to try the project and was not sure how they would react.
Though no one, myself included, was sure whether the project would have any impact, I was given permission to try. As you will see from the interviews afterwards, the meal staff and members of the school administration were very encouraged and affected by the outcome. In fact, the meal staff and the student body has asked me to help them start the project again in the coming school year and I hope to make this an annual event at my school even after I graduate.
What to ask the meal & cleaning staff
1. That the cleaning staff not dispose of the compost, recycling, and landfill waste until after you have measured them each day.
2. If not already provided, allow students to take smaller portions when ordering food.
3. If possible, have the meal staff work with you to measure how much food was not served at the end of each meal.
4. If not done already, ask that the meal and cleaning staff not waste food that has not been served during a meal (e.g., share with the staff or surrounding community).
02
Taking baseline measurements
You will need a good scale that can support the weight of the bins when full of discarded food. I used a Surmount Heavy Duty scale (shown below) that had a platform wide enough to support the widest bin I had to weigh. But you can use any similar type of scale.
Once you have the scale, first measure all the weights of all the bins when empty.
Then, without notifying the school community yet, measure the weights of all the bins after the meals are done every day for at least four weeks. This provides a basline measurement to compare against once the school community gets engaged in the project. I used my cell phone to take photos of the scale readings to that I had it handy and automatically had a time stamp attached to each photo.​
When recording the measurements for the day, it is also important to note what where the meals served. In particular, I found that meals containing bones usually produced heavier amounts of compost (especially chicken wings!). For me, this was unexpected evidence of how vegetarianism wastes less food.​​​
On the left is a graph of the baseline compost weight measured everyday.
I converted the weight of the food waste to the equivalent CO2 emissions of driving a typical gasoline-powered passenger vehicle a mile.
The six largest values were for meals that contained bones.
​It is also important to observe and record the amount of trash and recycling placed in other bins if they are next to the composting bins. This will be used later to ensure that people are not simply dumping more compost in other bins in order to improperly affect the results.​
Getting the word out
Once you have collected baseline measurements, it is time to get the word out to the school community explaining the impact of food waste on climate change and the project. I used posters and flyers located in the cafe and throughout the school. I also made announcements during the weekly school-wide meetings.
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03
04
Taking measurements and communicating progress
For the next three to four weeks, I measured the total food waste everyday, keeping track of the meals that include bones. I also checked the recycling and landfill waste bins to make sure people were not improperly disposing of food waste.
It was very important to give daily feedback to the community on the food waste as this made the activity engaging as a community game where members could track their progress together and build a sense of teamwork.
05
Conclusions and Recommendations
After at least three to four weeks of running the project and measuring food waste, tabulate your results and analyze any differences from the baseline measurements. My project was able to achieve at least a 15% reduction for both meals with bones and meals without bones as shown below.
It is important to share this achievement with your community as this can encourage others to develop and implement other projects that can have an impact on the climate crisis. Leaders of my school's student body have already contacted me about implementing the project again this school year and I am excited about making this a regular program in our school for future classes.
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Overall I am quite surprised and very pleased with the outcome of the project as it was able to demonstrate both
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Immediate quantitative benefits: 15% reduction in food waste in just three weeks
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Long-term qualitative benefits: school administrators, meal staff, and students have modified their behaviors and are eager to continue repeating this project for the next school year. My plan is to set this up to become a regular annual event at the school any possibly other schools.
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The project also demonstrated that the setting up climate change projects creatively using a collaborative, community-based, game model with measurable and frequent feedback is able to make an impact.
Recommendations based on what I learned from this project
Measuring un-served food to reduce overall consumption
As the community becomes more aware of not wasting food, people are expected to ask for smaller serving sizes. This should reduce the amount of food the meal staff needs to purchase and prepare for each meal since less is being served and wasted. Ultimately this would be the goal of this project -- to reduce overall consumption as this also reduces the amount of CO2 emitted to grow the raw produce and prepare the food.
To have this effect on the food system, it would help if​ the meal staff can collect data on how much food is not served after each meal time. As the project progresses and the amount of food not served increases, the meal staff can use the data to better estimate and appropriately reduce the amount of food they need to purchase and prepare.
Extending the collaborative community gamification model
Climate change is not a game. It is a serious challenge for all of us. But I think we can be creative in developing solutions that can enable everyone to do what they can to solve the issue.
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I encourage others to think about other ways we can use this community gamification model to support people in solving other aspects of the climate crisis that rely on personal and community decisions. It could be on cumulative electricity usage, non-renewable energy usage, transportation energy usage, etc... What gets measured can be solved -- so it is important that we find good ways to measure what it is we want to reduce and provide frequent updates on this to the community. When people can see the progress they are making together they are more likely to change their behavior and ways of thinking! And this adds a little fun into the solutions needed to solve our on-going climate crisis.
If you want to start this project, have any question, want support, or discuss other ideas PLEASE contact me at rishi.leung@gmail.com. I would be very happy to hear from you and support this work!