Welcome to My Food Waste Project
I am glad you are here and would like to share what I did and learned from this project I started in my junior year of high school. I hope you might find it interesting and get inspired to try something similar at your own school. At the bottom of this page is a link to another webpage describing the steps I took to get this project going and my contact information in case you want to reach out.
- Rishi Leung
An Experiment
Climate engagement via collaborative community-based gamification
We can solve the climate emergency.
The McKinsey Report describes the options and quantifies the cost of transitioning to net-zero. The Harvard study "The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world" demonstrates that social and political change can be achieved by engaging just 3.5% of the population. The challenge is getting 3.5% of people to take the needed climate action.
Fear to face the facts and feeling discouraged or helpless to do anything are the biggest hurdles. This project developed a collaborative community-based gamification strategy to see how incorporating both fun and a collaborative framework could show measurable gains in GHG emissions while contradicting people's feelings of powerlessness and isolation in tackling the climate emergency. The results were surprisingly good and beyond my expectations.
Impact: Reducing CO2 Emissions
15%
In less than 3 weeks, the project was able to reduce the school's average food waste by at least 15%
Impact: Change People's Behavior
Conclusions
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 setting up climate change projects using creative ideas such as this collaborative, community-based, game model with measurable and frequent feedback is able to make an impact.