SMITHFIELD, R.I. — How much would it cost to switch every elementary school cafeteria in the state from throwing away their food scraps to composting them?

A cool $750,000 might not cover the entire cost, but it sure won’t hurt.

The Rhode Island School Recycling Project (RISRP) recently received that amount in grants to go toward the organization’s goal of helping every elementary school in the state compost their lunchtime food scraps.

The funding is one of the largest infusions of cash the organization has obtained, and comes at a time when many federal and philanthropic entities are pulling back on funding.

Of the total, $500,000 comes from the Rhode Island Foundation’s new “Climate Action and Sustainability” priority, a portion of which was sourced from donors who wished to remain anonymous.

The remainder of the funding comes from 11th Hour Racing, a Newport-based organization that aims to improve the health of seas, soil, and people and establish connections between all three. 11^th Hour Racing has awarded RISRP $193,000 in grants since 2023.

“The true stars are the students,” said Warren Heyman, organizing director of RISRP, to a packed cafeteria of students at the Raymond LaPerche Elementary School last week.

Students showed off the training they received from RISRP, separating food scrap from regular trash and putting uneaten and otherwise perfectly good food aside for consumption by hungry students in need.

RISRP has been teaching sustainability to elementary school students in some form or another since 2001. Its original mission was school recycling, separating paper, plastic, and cardboard so schools became compliant with state recycling mandates.

Their original recycling mission ended in 2007, but Heyman and co-director Jim Corwin brought it back during the pandemic to fill in a problem they saw in the state’s school systems: too many schools were throwing away too much food that could feed others.

Armed with a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, RISRP officially launched its “Let’s Get Food Smart, RI” program in fall 2021 in the Birchwood and Nathan Bishop middle schools and the LaPerche and Rhode elementary schools.

Heyman said the project so far has launched in 63 individual schools across 17 school districts around the state. Since September they have launched in 10 additional schools, and Corwin and Heyman expect to reach a total of 25 new schools by the end of this academic year.

“Because of your efforts in this school, other schools across the state will learn from your example,” said David Cicilline, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation, told students.

Per the General Assembly, schools have to get serious about diverting their food waste from the Central Landfill. Lawmakers enacted a food waste ban in January 2023 that mandated that schools within 15 miles of an authorized composting or anaerobic digester facility had to start diverting food scrap from the landfill.

Schools in Rhode Island are mini-factories of food waste. RISRP estimates 27,777 pounds of food are thrown away on a regular school day, of which at least 4,000 pounds is unopened, perfectly edible food that could go toward hungry families. Across a year, Rhode Island schools send 5 million pounds of food to the landfill, according to RISRP.

The landfill part is a key reason for the new grants. The Central Landfill in Johnston, owned by the state and operated by the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, is expected to reach its capacity by 2046, and the state has no clear plan for a replacement on the table.

Food scrap accounts for a small sliver of what’s sent to the landfill, but for waste and environmental advocates, every little bit will help over the next 20 years. According to Heyman, the Get Food Smart program has already reduced the amount of cafeteria waste headed to the landfill by 78%.

Rollout of the food waste ban has been predictably slow. The new law came with no funding, and no penalty for schools not complying with the law. It has put RISRP’s services in great demand, and organizers said the new grant will go a long way toward making every school compliant with the food waste ban.

The results at Laperche Elementary School speak for themselves. Prior to the arrival of RISRP, the school’s lunchroom was throwing out 10,044 pounds of food waste every year. After the school installed sorting tables and began sifting out food scraps, the total amount of food waste produced by students per year went down to 594 pounds, a reduction of 92%.

To put that in climate terms, by avoiding thousands of pounds of food scraps from the landfill, students at LaPerche Elementary have reduced emissions by 28.1 million metric tons of C02 equivalent. That’s a greenhouse gas emission reduction equivalent to taking 6.1 million cars off the road. Decomposing food waste releases methane, a greenhouse gas with a potency 28 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 100-year time span.