WOW! (Weighing Our Waste)

We started our Waste-Free Lunch kickoff by doing a baseline weigh-in of what the students are throwing away at lunch. Our goal is to make improvements and reduce the amount of garbage we generate. In the coming weeks, we will work together to educate families and students to pack a waste-free lunch and then we will repeat our weigh-ins several more times this school year. It will be fun to encourage some healthy competition between the grades! :) Here are our results...

Earth Day Weigh-in, April 22, 2013

First Lunch (151 students) Kindergarten & 1st Grader's trash weighed in at 39 lbs or .26 pounds of trash per student. 

Roughly half bought and half packed a lunch. There were a lot of individually wrapped items thrown in the trash. Everyone was very good with clean up, however everything got dumped into the trash cans! One apple, and six blueberries made it into the compost.

Second Lunch (142 students) 2nd & 3rd Grader's trash weighed in at 46 lbs or .32 lbs of trash per student.

Although a lot of kids had a packed lunch, more kids bought a hot lunch at this lunch. The kids cleaned up fast, and again everything got dumped into the trash. One kiwi and two apples made it into the compost though! The kids noticed us and asked questions...is this recyclable? Does this go in this container? They were curious about the scale and what we were weighing.

Third Lunch (160 students) 4th & 5th Grader's trash weighed in at 41 lbs. or .26 lbs of trash per student.

The kids seemed fairly divided between packed lunches and bought lunches. The clean up was very good, and again, everything was dumped into the trash. Nothing was placed into compost. The older kids gave questioning looks, but were busy amongst themselves. One student asked where a water bottle should go. 

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