Back-to-school tips for eco-smart kids

Then you’ll hear an in-depth success story from Lovin Elementary School in Georgia, where educators and students have cut cafeteria food waste by over 70% with the help of WWF’s Food Waste Warriors program. Gerin Hennebaul, a teacher at Lovin Elementary, joins Seth to talk through her school’s journey.

From reusable lunch gear to share tables and composting, this episode is full of ideas you can bring to your own school or home. Plus, learn about WWF’s Wild Classroom resources and a new grant opportunity for educators through the Green Prints for the Future initiative.

Tune in to discover how small changes can make a big impact—and how you can help raise the next generation of eco-smart kids.

Links for More Info:

Food Waste Warriors

Wild Classroom toolkits

Green Prints for the Future

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Larson: Hey folks. Let's get today's episode started with a new segment called Wild Guess. Each episode I'll ask a trivia question related to the topic of our episode. Do your best to guess the answer and then stay tuned to the end of our episode to find out if you're right. Here's today's Wild Guess.

How many tons of food go to waste in American school cafeterias each year? If you think you know the answer, drop it in the comments section on YouTube or Spotify. Keep listening to catch the answer at the end of this episode and stay tuned in between to hear how schools can take action to keep food out of landfills.

Now, here's today's episode…

Welcome to Nature Breaking, a podcast produced by World Wildlife Fund. I'm Seth Larson, and today I'll be joined by my co-host Hayley Lawton, for a conversation about how to bring a more sustainable approach to back-to-school season. Whether you're a parent, a student, a teacher, or just someone who cares about helping our environment, there's a lot that each of us can do around this time of year.

Hayley and I will share some of the best tips and tricks that we've collected from our WWF coworkers. And then you'll hear from Gerin Hennebaul, a Georgia teacher who is participating in WWF's Food Waste Warrior program, which helps to reduce the amount of food wasted in school cafeterias, while also getting kids excited about giving back to nature.

Before we get started, please take a moment to like this episode on YouTube and rate our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other apps. Those likes and ratings really matter for the algorithm on different platforms and help our show reach more people. With that, let's get started.

Hayley, it's so awesome to see you again. Welcome back.

Hayley Lawton: Thank you. So nice to see you again too. Yeah.

Seth Larson: Happy end of summer. It's, it's upon us already and it's back to school season, right? It's, and so wanted to have you in today to talk about what that season means. And I wanted to start by just asking what it meant to you as a child growing up.

Did you have any big traditions around back to school? Was it exciting? Was it scary? What was that like for you as a kid?

Hayley Lawton: So, I was always so excited to go back to school every year. One of the things that I love doing is getting new pencils and pens every year, which may not seem like a big deal, but I just love holding a pen and pencil in my hand instead of typing.

Yeah. Another big thing, whenever I was younger, I don't think this is a thing now, but book covers, it was a stretchy material and so each subject had a different color, and I just felt like the coolest person walking around with them.

Seth Larson: Did you ever have to make your own book covere with… I used to have to do it with a paper grocery bag. You would cut it up if you folded it and taped it so that it would fit your books?

Hayley Lawton: Yes. But the other one was from the bookstore.

Seth Larson: That's nice. Yeah. I don't think I have those yet. I think that was like a later invention. I'm just a few years older than you.

Hayley Lawton: What about you, Seth?

Seth Larson: Yeah, definitely always looked forward to it. I think there was a little bit of anxiety about new teacher, new class, my friends are going to be with me this year. But for the most part I think I really look forward to it. Always got a new pair of sneakers. That was a big thing. I usually take basketball sneakers for me. Penny Hardaway was a big star, and his shoes were super popular in the mid-nineties, and I had a couple of pairs of Penny Hardaway’s... they were the Air Pennies. And new clothes, all that sort of stuff. Trapper Keepers were the most popular thing when I was in elementary school. They were like these really elaborate binders that you could put your notebooks in and your pens and pencils, and they had all these secret pockets where you could tuck stuff into. I always looked forward to getting all that stuff and finding out how the new school year is going to go. But yeah, little anxiety, little excitement, a mix of both.

Hayley Lawton: Yeah. That's so interesting because, for my classes, we had the same class every year.

Seth Larson: Oh. It was mixed up for me. Every year was different. Really?

Hayley Lawton: Yeah. Yeah. Did you have multiple classes for each grade?

Seth Larson: I want to say maybe there were like four or five, like for first grade there were five different first grade classrooms, give or take. Oh, wow. And that went all, up through Elementary school.

Hayley Lawton: Okay. Yeah, we had 10 people.

Seth Larson: Wow, okay. Very small. I was in a pretty rural area. We didn't have a huge school, but I think my graduating class from high school was like 120 kids and it was like the same group of kids that started first grade together.

Hayley Lawton: Well, we wanted to start on this topic because this is back to school season for a lot of school districts around the country, and as many people get ready for this transition, there are actually a lot of different ways to think about your impact on the environment and how you can make a difference for nature.

So, we reached out to a few of our colleagues here at WWF and asked for their ideas about how to bring a more sustainable approach to the school year, and we're actually going to share a few today. So, Seth, do you have any that you suggest?

Seth Larson: Absolutely. One that I heard that I really liked and resonated with me was thinking about, we talked about getting new clothes. I always get a new pair of shoes every year. Well, that means you've got old clothes that need to go somewhere, right? One thing that I really would encourage everyone to think about is. Upcycling your old clothes so that they're, not just going into a landfill. I know my son is about to start first grade and he basically grew out of all of his kindergarten clothes already. His shoes that we got him at the beginning of the summer that we hoped would stretch into first grade are falling apart because he drags his feet everywhere. And so, like we've got a lot of clothes that we're going to have to get rid of. And so, there's a lot of options to do this now. It's so much easier than it used to be when I was a kid. A lot of communities have Buy Nothing groups through Facebook that you can join, and they're specifically designed to help you give away old things, whether it's furniture or clothes, or toys or whatever. So, check in, see if those are options in your area. A lot of communities still have those old-fashioned drop boxes where you can just donate old clothes that you're not using anymore.

And if your community doesn't have those options, you can also talk to your school about whether they'd be willing to set up a clothing swap at the beginning of the school year. This is something a lot of schools and communities do, and it's a great way for older kids to be able to hand down those lightly used items to younger kids who might need them. And so, it's a twofer, you're helping kids who need those clothes, whose parents may not want to buy clothes that their kids are only going to wear for three or four months before they grow out of them. And you're preventing those clothes from ending up in a landfill and just wasting the material and the energy that went into producing them.

So, there's that great sustainability benefit as well.

Hayley Lawton: Yeah, those are really good ideas. I know we grew up, oh, I went to private school and so we wore uniforms every single day. So also, another thing that we would do, instead of going to the uniform store and buying those expensive uniforms every year, people would just bring in the uniforms that they outgrew.

Seth Larson: Yep.

Hayley Lawton: So that was really helpful too.

Seth Larson: Absolutely. Super great idea. Hayley, what's an idea that you heard that you liked about how people can be a little bit more sustainably minded around the beginning of the school year?

Hayley Lawton: I have a few different ideas. The first one would be re-usable water bottles, lunch boxes, snack containers. I had this snack container whenever I was younger that I can vividly remember. It was orange with yellow in the middle and a blue top and I just loved putting my snacks in there. And that also helps avoid excessive packaging and plastic.

Seth Larson: Yeah.

Hayley Lawton: Another thing would be to try to buy snacks and supplies in bulk. Ah, so that’s really helpful. If it's possible you could walk or bike to school. But I know it's not available everywhere. When you're looking to buy new supplies for the school year, look at last year's. You may not need all the new notebooks or pens and pencils like I did.

Seth Larson: If my parents tried to tell me that I didn't need a new Trapper Keeper, I probably would've argued with 'me. But you're totally right. Sometimes as parents, as adults, we need to just be, the voice of reason. And yeah, if you've already got a box of crayons that are barely used, yeah, you don't need to need anymore.

Hayley Lawton: And then the last thing would be, I'm not sure if this is working for elementary school students and middle school students, but in high school, we would use eBooks on our laptops or tablets instead of textbooks. But if electronics aren't available, you can always reuse someone's textbooks from the previous year too.

Seth Larson: Yeah, that's a great idea. And I specifically want to call out and agree with you on the reusable water bottles, lunch boxes, and snack packages, because those are areas where you can, as an individual, you can generate an incredible amount of waste really quickly if you're bringing a juice box and single use plastic packaging, or throw-away lunch bags every day to school, that's going to add up so much over the course of a school year. So, getting those lunchboxes that you can reuse every day, the little snack, plastic snap together, things that you can reuse and just throw in the dishwasher. So much better than just single use products that are going to end up in a landfill right away.

Hayley Lawton: And they're really fun to use also. All different colors.

Seth Larson: Totally. We should also mention, Hayley, that in addition to those ideas, WWF actually has some great resources for educators, parents, and kids to take a look at as they're preparing for back-to-school season. We are going to have a whole segment later in this episode, which I hope people stay tuned to by our Food Waste Warrior program, which is really cool in helping schools avoid food waste.

But we also have a program called Wild Classroom, which provides a whole array of teaching resources, like lesson plans, videos, games, and Kahoot quizzes. All to help kids learn about species habitats and ecosystems.

Hayley Lawton: Yeah. So, you're absolutely right, Wild Classroom has a real cool new opportunity right now.

The Green Prints for the Future Sustainability Project Fund gives educators the opportunity to apply for funding to implement sustainable solutions in their schools or communities with the help of Wild Classroom. So, for example, if students notice a large number of disposable bags or plastic water bottles in the lunchroom or cafeteria, teachers can then work with the students to brainstorm a solution to help try to get rid of them.

Yeah, that's super cool and we're going to include a link to more information about that in our show notes for this episode. I definitely encourage any teachers listening to this to take a look and apply for that program because it can bring really great financial resources and educational resources to your school to help tackle some cool projects like that. And it doesn't have to be just for the environment; it can be a fun thing for kids and teachers to work together as well. So that grant program, the application window closes on November 15th, 2025. So, get those applications in the next couple months and take advantage of that.

And then one last thing I would like to add, Seth, that you talked about fun projects or fun challenges. So, I just thought of considering having a back-to-school eco checklist.

Seth Larson: Oh, so tell me about it.

Hayley Lawton: Yes, with the tips that we just provided, people could add their own, use the ones that we did, put them on your fridge or share them with your friends. And it's just an easy checklist that can be fun to remember.

That's a great way to be a little more organized about all the ideas that we just threw against a wall.

Seth Larson: No, thank you for thinking of that, Hayley. That's great, so we'll leave it there. I hope everyone will stay tuned for my conversation shortly with an educator who's been involved in the Food Waste Warrior program and implementing that in a school in Georgia.

And, for now Hayley, thank you again for being here and it was so great to see you.

Hayley Lawton: Thank you. You are too.

Seth Larson: Okay. Let's move to our second segment. A few months ago, I interviewed Pete Pearson, WWF's Vice President for Food Loss and Waste. One of the programs Pete talked about in that episode was our Food Waste Warriors program, which helps schools to avoid food waste in cafeterias.

As Pete shared in that interview, the school lunch program in the US serves between 30 and 35 million meals per day. And if you've ever seen a little kid eat, you know that they often leave a lot of food on their plate. So, there's a huge opportunity within schools to put a dent in America's food waste problem. One of the schools that participates in WWF's Food Waste Warriors program is Lovin Elementary School in Georgia. I recently had a chance to interview one of the teachers there, Gerin Hennebaul, about why they got involved in the program and what the results have been so far. Here's our conversation.

Okay, joining me now is Gerin Hannibal, a STEM educator at Lovin Elementary School in Georgia. Gerin, welcome to Nature Breaking.

Gerin Hennebaul: Thank you for having me, nice to meet everybody.

Seth Larson: Yeah, and I'm really glad that we're having this conversation today. I've talked a little bit about the Food Waste Warriors program on this podcast before, but I've never had the opportunity to hear directly from an educator who has real world experience implementing the program. I'm excited to hear your story and everything you have to share today. Before we talk about the Food Waste Warriors program though, can you tell us a little bit more about Lovin Elementary School? Where is it? What grades do it serve, and what's the school culture like there?

Gerin Hennebaul: All right. Lovin Elementary School, we are a Title I school. We are about 45 minutes east of Atlanta. We're in a county called Gwinnett County. It's a very large public school district.

Seth Larson: Okay.

Gerin Hennebaul: We have around 850 kids. I just pulled up our new numbers, about 850 kids. And we do serve kids from pre-K all the way to fifth grade. And something special about our school, we are very diverse. We have kids from all over the world that come here and about 20% of our population are served through our special education department. So

Seth Larson: Wow.

Gerin Hennebaul: Yes, so it's a lot of everything and they're amazing kids. We have been a Georgia Department of Education, STEM Certified School, with a focus on Ag STEM. We pull a lot of environmental and agriculture education into what we do.

Seth Larson: Oh, that's great.

Gerin Hennebaul: Since 2018, and then we just got re-certified this past Spring, for another five years. That's a pretty big honor. We're the only Title I school in Gwinnett County to have that certification right now. So, we're proud. Lovin's vision, now I did write these down. I didn't want to miss any words. Our vision is to cultivate a community of learners who are innovative, collaborative, and prepared for the future. Our mission and motto are molding minds, building character, celebrating uniqueness, and leaving a legacy with the motto: 'learn it, love it, and live it." Our school is called "Lovin”, and we tend to use the Lovin and lots of the stuff that we do. Because we are a STEM school, we have a school-wide focus on our environmental impact. Our culture strongly revolves around solving problems in our community and realizing that the small changes that our students make can make a big difference, a big impact on the world. So small changes have a big impact. And then we have a school-wide driving question every year that all of our big projects tie back into. And our school-wide driving question is, how might we inspire and empower our community to adopt sustainable practices that protect the environment and ensure access to health resources? And this all started back in 2017, 2018, and it's just built and grown into everything that we have at Lovin now. And all of sustainability and just knowledge about food waste is just part of our culture now and what we do.

Seth Larson: Yeah, let's dive into that and more of the story about how that came to be. My next question was going to be, how did Lovin get started with the Food Waste Warriors program? Was there like an aha moment, a light bulb went off and you saw a problem or someone else at the school saw a problem and said, oh this is something we really need to tackle. And then that led to Food Waste Warriors coming into play? I'd love to hear about that story of origin a little bit more.

Gerin Hennebaul: Yeah, so back in, around the fall of 2018, we noticed in our cafeteria just the sheer amount of food that was going to be wasted every day. Our custodians had a really hard time keeping up with the amount of trash that was leaving the cafeteria. So, in, we were already doing things like recycling paper, recycling textiles, recycling plastics and things like that. But we had never thought about our food. And so, in January of 2019 is when we discovered the Food Waste Warriors program, and we worked with... We have a program here in Gwinnett called, it's Gwinnett Clean and Beautiful's Green and Healthy Schools Program. And Gwinnett Clean and Beautiful, their Green and Healthy Schools program works with Gwinnett Clean and Beautiful, and Gwinnett County Public Schools to bring environmental awareness to all the schools. They're amazing. They connected us with World Wildlife Fund, and we conducted our first Food Waste Warrior food audit in January of 2019. And that day, as the students were excited to enter the cafeteria, we lined up two cafeteria tables on either side, and they, we had the big, the big five-gallon plastic buckets and each bucket was labeled with fruits or vegetables or milk, water. We weighed everything from there, the paper, the plastics, the miscellaneous foods, such as it happened to be Taco Day. So that was gross. So, the tacos, we weighed everything separately that day. We also counted all of the recoverable foods and recoverable foods are basically the foods and drinks that are still sealed in their packaging that could potentially be shared with somebody else. So, the day, this is where I have to look at my data because it was back in 2018.

This was in January 2019, I'm sorry. On the day of our initial audit, we served 722 lunches that day. The audit revealed that we discarded 449 total pounds of food, just the food waste, in just one day. Of that waste, 74 pounds were fruit and vegetable scraps, and 120 pounds were recoverable items such as unopened food and drinks.

So, it was amazing, and we took pictures of all of that so the kids could see. And it was very eye-opening to the teachers, to the cafeteria staff, the custodial staff, and to the students too, it was very eye-opening.

Seth Larson: Yeah, that's crazy, but it also doesn't surprise me. And I've referenced this before when I've interviewed Pete Pearson here at WWF on this show before, just observing my own son and having visited his cafeteria once or twice. Kids get excited, they're talking with their friends or they just, their appetites swing wildly from one day to the next where they may eat a whole tray of food one day, and then the next they have a sip of milk. And that's the end of it.

Gerin Hennebaul: Yep.

Seth Larson: So, I can totally see how this happens when you scale up hundreds and hundreds of kids. But those numbers are still pretty staggering when there was over 400 pounds of waste and the way that breaks down.

Gerin Hennebaul: So, we like to do the "if then what" kind of thinking. And so, if that trend of about 450 pounds of food wasted every day, if that continued throughout the school year, we would be throwing away over 2000 pounds of food per week, or over 13,000 pounds per month. And if you look at a whole school year, it would be over 81,000 pounds of food waste during one school year, which is a lot.

Seth Larson: Yeah. Yeah.

Gerin Hennebaul: It was a team effort that day too, to gather all of this data. And looking back to January of 2019, that's where we started. We didn't have a plan to go forward. Everything since January of 2019 has happened very naturally and very organically. And even the things that I did last week in the classrooms that I didn't do last year, are already making kind of an impact. So, it's neat to see what's happened over the past, however many years, six years or whatever it's been.

Seth Larson: Yeah, yeah. I know a little bit about the Food Waste Warriors program and, I said we have covered it a little before on the show. It basically provides a toolkit to schools that contains an array of solutions that schools try or not try, depending on what makes sense for them. It's everything from starting a composting program to adjusting the way lunch is served by letting kids choose the amount of food they feel like they need that day rather than serving predetermined portions. And then there's ideas like creating a share table where unwanted food that hasn't been opened yet can be put out for others to take. I'd love to hear more about the specific tactics that Lovin Elementary deployed, and which have really been the most helpful for you.

Gerin Hennebaul: After that first audit in January 2019, we worked with specifically our third graders and our fifth-grade students, that particular Spring, to brainstorm ideas. Now teachers are very clever, and they have ways of guiding there, their ideas as well. But, so that Spring our, in January our students sat down, and they brainstorm ideas. What can we do to stop a lot of this food from going in the trash? And that particular spring from January until May, they came up with a few ideas.

One was your typical PSAs on the announcements. A lot of the kids, one of us, had a lot of milk thrown away, those kids did not even open. They just threw 'me in the trash, and that's still been a big problem over the past couple of years, and we're working on that again this year. But what students don't realize is, in Georgia, there's different laws that, or rules, guidelines that you have to follow when the kid, like they have to get an entree and they have to get one fruit, one vegetable. But they think they have to get milk just because the student in front of them gets milk. They just watched what happened, and I watched it in kindergarten this year. I watched the first kindergartner come to grab his milk and then everybody else in the line did, so just those PSAs to let the students know, everybody, you don't have to get milk. If you love milk and you're going to drink your milk, get milk. But if not, you don't have to choose one. That was one of the things the kids wanted to do was just get the word out there of some misconceptions that they might have.

The second thing, we had a lot. We have a separate teacher bar on the corner; it's like a salad bar. And at the end of the day, the cafeteria staff can't just cover the salad up and save it for another day, it all goes in the trash. We also have chickens. We have 10 hens. They're called our Lovin Ladies, cause, play on the name again, our Lovin Ladies. So, what we decided to do is, instead of all of the fruits and or the vegetables from the teacher bar going in the trash, every day our cafeteria staff puts those in buckets. And our fifth graders take those out to the chickens. So, it saves us money. It's, our chickens eat healthier than a lot of teachers do here and they're spoiled. Our chickens are spoiled rotten. And it also saves all that from going to the landfill. And then the third thing,

Seth Larson: if, what if I could just, I...

Gerin Hennebaul: No, go ahead.

Seth Larson: I love your school's commitment to alliteration...

Gerin Hennebaul: Ah, yes.

Seth Larson: Naming all these different programs. What, I feel like not every school has chickens hanging around. What are the chickens there for? Is that part of the STEM?

Gerin Hennebaul: Yes. So, we have, we have a huge, it's our STEAM garden. The A in stem is for the arts. For those of you don't, who are new to STEM,

Seth Larson:

Gerin Hennebaul: it, we're a STEM school, so it's science, technology, engineering, and math.

We're working on, so we're officially a STEM school, but we're working on the A piece, which is the arts. So, adding music and arts and theater and things like that. So that's the piece we're working on in the next few years. So, we have a STEAM garden, and out on our.... It's huge. We grow fruits and vegetables.

We feed a lot of the community, especially during the summer with our garden, and we also have chickens out there. The chickens tie into every grade level standard, everything from microorganisms to life cycles to needs of plants and animals. And so, we've had our, we've had our hens, we have 10 of them.

We've had them since 2017. Each grade level, that particular year did something called a legacy project and our second graders worked with our pre-K students to hatch eggs, and they worked with our high school to build our coop. The engineering department of the high school built our coop.

Yeah, so everything, it's amazing to see how everything, everything ties together. We just have permission to use our chicken bedding in our compost bin. It all is just a giant web of together.

Seth Larson: And I think one of the cool things about Food Waste Warriors is that it provides this toolkit with these suggestions, but schools can adapt based on local realities and not every school is going to have a chicken coop, but the fact that you do, that's such a creative solution to be able to take that leftover salad that was going to be tossed out anyways and have it serve a secondary useful purpose.

Gerin Hennebaul: When we initially got our chickens, it was a life cycles project for our second graders and the food waste and the composting that wasn't even on the radar at the time. It has all just grown together just so organically and naturally. It was really nice. But one of the big things that, that year, in 2019, that our students came up with was our share table.

Seth Larson: Okay.

Gerin Hennebaul: Our share table, we have a table with some baskets on it, and the baskets hold things like sealed bananas, cereals that haven't been open, cereal bars, oranges, things like that. And then we have a refrigerator next to it that has a clear, glass door on it. Cause if it doesn't, the kids will just stand there with it wide open like they do at home. But in our refrigerator, depending on the guidelines, it's different for every district and state. You can put anything in there that's sealed. Bags of carrots, bags of apples. Sometimes we'll have sealed string cheese or water or juice, things like that. Milks, whatever. They implemented those three things, the first year, the PSAs, the teacher bar to the chickens, and the share table. And after the kids implemented those for a couple of months, we conducted another audit in March of 2019. So that particular day we served 810 lunches, so there were 88 more lunches than the first audit. We reduced our food waste to 319 pounds.

Seth Larson: Oh wow.

Gerin Hennebaul: It was, yes. And then 47 pounds of that were fruit and vegetable scraps. We also sent 108 recovers... pounds of recoverable items to the share table that day instead of going in the trash. So, we discovered that the share table is where a lot, it has saved so much food waste from going into the trash. Yes. So, it was...

Seth Larson: And this is all stuff that kids either brought themselves or gotten from the cafeteria line, but then they decided they weren't going to eat it. And

Gerin Hennebaul: For the share table, the share table is strictly things from the cafeteria line. We don't put things from home because of student allergies, things like that. Like

Seth Larson: Yep, yep.

Gerin Hennebaul: We couldn't put a sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwich there because of the peanut allergies. So, we do have teachers and cafeteria staff that monitor that to make sure, I walk by that share table many times a day just to double check. But the kids are really pretty good about what they put in there. It's, the share table quickly became a sustainable part of our culture.

In 2019, when we got to the end of that school year, of course we closed it down for the summer. We unplugged the refrigerator and everything. When we got back to school in August, it picked right back up. I did a refresher on the announcements, reminding kids what could and could not go in the share table. And then COVID hit, and we had to shut, we had to shut everything down. It was, I remember I came to school. So, COVID hit in the Spring of 2020. We came back in the fall of 2020. It was just such a strange time. And I remember walking in the hallway and when I saw that refrigerator unplugged, oh, that's what got to me. Because I was like, oh my gosh. Everything that we've been doing and all these strides that our kids have made to reduce this food waste, like I just felt like everything came to a screeching halt, which it did. But that's what really got me, to see that dark refrigerator. And so we weren't, we weren't allowed to do our share table that year. Understandably it's sharing food, we couldn't do it.

Seth Larson: Sure.

Gerin Hennebaul: But the next year when we were allowed to, we plugged it back in, set it back up. It was like those kids did not miss a beat. They were right back to you... it was unbelievable, just how sustainable it had become, even when we had the COVID break or whatever.

We kept the program rolling with the share table. It came back in 2021, 22, and then, in January of 22, we started our composting program because we were taking care of our recovery. The teacher bar was feeding the chickens every single day. But we started a composting program, and it's called Compost Connectors, and we started very small. I wanted to start with the whole school day one. Composting had been like on our five-year plan that we had come up with. It was like year one every year, and it just kept getting bumped down. Mainly I didn't know how to do it, I didn't know where to start. But Gwinnet Clean and Beautiful helped us with that as well. And so, we started our composting program. We started really small. We just started with our fifth graders. And so that Spring I would teach a fifth-grade class about composting. They would collect fruit and vegetable waste in the cafeteria for their whole grade level. And then a couple weeks later, I would teach another class, and they would try it in fifth grade. So, we did that during the Spring of 2022, just to see how it would go, and it went great. But since January of '22, our, we've expanded our composting program. And now we collect food waste every single day. We started the second week of school in our cafeteria, first grade through fifth grade, and we do it every single day until the last day of school. And it is part of our culture now. And it's, it's been amazing. So much so that in February of 2025, just this past February, we did another school-wide food audit, a Food Waste Warrior audit. And that day, our students only threw away 128 pounds of food waste, which still sounds like a lot, but that's way better than the 400 or whatever pounds they threw away in, back in 2019. So, it was...

Seth Larson: That is incredible.

Gerin Hennebaul: It was great, it was.

Seth Larson: And, just to recap, so basically, think you shared is that you've taken the step of making sure kids understand that they don't need to take milk in the line, because that was something that you and others at the school observed.

And, just letting kids know about that in morning announcements drove some progress. You've got salad ingredients from the teacher bar going out to the chickens. You've got the share table implemented and that's been a huge success. And you've got the composting program. And among those different efforts, it comes down from over 400 pounds of food per day going to waste, to just over a hundred, in the span of a handful of years.

Gerin Hennebaul: Yes.

Seth Larson: That's incredible and I think it really speaks to... all of those things took place in the time. But in the big picture, they're relatively simple things that most schools can do in some form or fashion, or that most households can do in some form or fashion. I think that's really inspirational and a good reminder of: A. How much food can go to waste when we're not really thinking about it and being deliberate about it, and B. How much of a difference can we make by just putting a little effort and a little care and consideration into it.

Hey all, my interview with Gerin went on for a few more minutes, but unfortunately, we lost the rest of the recording due to a technical issue. My last question to Gerin was what advice she would give to other schools that want to tackle food waste. Her answer? Start small. Put together a five-year plan and think about what you want to focus on each year. Get things started with a food waste audit to figure out your baseline, and then work with students, fellow teachers and administrators to come up with simple solutions to the problems your audit identifies. And then think about adding one new solution each year.

As Gerin said, "get it running and get it sustainable before you move on to your next big initiative." I really want to thank Gerin and the students and staff at Lovin Elementary for the work they've done. Thanks to their efforts, food waste in their cafeteria fell by over 70% between 2019 and 2025. That is amazing.

If you're a teacher or administrator, or a parent or student with a passion for nature, then please consider taking action to bring Food Waste Warriors to your school. I'll include a link in the show notes of this episode with information about how to get involved.

And last but not least, here's the answer to this week's Wild Guess question. How many tons of food go to waste in American school cafeterias each year? Using a sample group as a basis, WWF estimates that roughly 530,000 tons of food per year goes to waste in US schools. And that doesn't include milk, which was calculated separately. We heard from Gerin today that milk was one of the biggest culprits, so you can imagine how much bigger that number might be. All the more reason to take action and stop food waste in your life today. Thanks for listening and together let's keep building a more sustainable future.