Blab Lab Podcast

The ABCs of Tackling Food Waste in Schools

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ecoRI News reporter Rob Smith speaks with Jim Corwin and Warren Heyman from Rhode Island Schools Recycling Club. The organization helps Rhode Island schools change their food-waste practices from the inside, diverting cafeteria food from the state’s rapidly filling landfill and making sure unused food goes to hungry families instead of the garbage bin.

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This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Rob Smith 

I’m reporter Rob Smith, filling in for host Colleen Cronin. Today on the podcast, we’re talking trash. Our guests today are Jim Corwin and Warren Heyman from the Rhode Island Schools Recycling Club. At the start of this year, a new law went into effect for all schools in Rhode Island mandating that as long as they are within a 15-mile radius of a compost service or anaerobic digester, that they must divert their food waste from the Central Landfill in Johnston. Every day, our guests Jim and Warren go into schools across the state to help them change their food-waste practices from the inside, diverting it from our rapidly filling landfill and making sure perfectly fine, unused food goes to hungry families instead of the dumpster. Guys, thanks for coming in the studio today.

Jim Corwin 

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Rob Smith 

Your organization was created in 2001 in conjunction with Resource Recovery and the Department of Environmental Management to improve school recycling rates, right? Not food waste.

Jim Corwin 

Not with food, with regular recycling.

Rob Smith 

How did you deal with that regular recycling?

Jim Corwin 

Well, it had just become state law at that point. And so, we created a process. And we got schools to start taking a look at how to do that correctly. And we did. We had money for about five or six years from Resource Recovery. And we got the recycling rate in schools from under 20% to over almost 70% over the course of about six years.

Rob Smith 

So then, in 2019, you guys pivoted to food waste. Can you talk about how that change happened?

Jim Corwin 

Yes, we got a call from the attorney general’s office because we had done some work and they knew about us. And they said, “We’re interested in food waste.” At that time, the legislature was considering a food-waste ban for schools where they wanted schools to start separating organics, and so they asked us to quantify food waste in schools. And we went out and did 15 schools, five in an urban district, five and a rural district, and five in a suburban district — elementary, middle, and high schools. And, of course, Rob, you know who wastes the most food? Right? High school, middle schoolers, or elementary schoolers?

Rob Smith 

I’m being quizzed? High schoolers?

Jim Corwin 

You fail. High schoolers waste the least, believe it or not. It’s elementary schoolers, closely followed by middle schoolers, because they get too much food.

Warren Heyman 

Yeah, the food service company serves the same size of pizza, a slice of pizza to an elementary school, middle school and a high school student. So, for a high schooler, that’s a nice-sized pizza, but for middle school or an elementary school student, that’s a huge size slice of pizza!

Jim Corwin 

As an aside, our focus on prevention happens in the second year of our relationship with the school. And that’s where we go in and remind the food service provider and the cafeteria staff to have something called “Offer Versus Serve.” It’s what the USDA promotes, aggressively, the most important thing we can do is prevent food waste from happening in the first place. So that’s a big area of focus for us in our second year.

Rob Smith 

So why aren’t schools composting or diverting their food waste before now?

Jim Corwin 

When we get into a school, and we typically recruit schools ourselves, because we want to make sure we have an administration that’s 100% behind this, and that we have access to all the key stakeholders; the custodian is as important to us as the principal, as are the food service workers and the staff.

We’re lucky Warren is a former union organizer for food-service workers, and so he has the vocabulary and the ability to get into that group of people and make them feel part of the process. And so, to answer your question, the reason that we haven’t been seeing it is, everybody is passionate about this; when they see the waste happening in the cafeteria, they, they’re horrified. But you know, they don’t have time to connect the dots. And we go in and do that for them.

Warren Heyman 

And I could add to that. When we get into the cafeteria, everybody is like, this is a huge, huge problem. They’re angry about the amount of good edible healthy food that’s thrown in the trash. Or they’re angry about the whole situation that the recycling is not being done, but they’re totally overwhelmed with running a school and all the things that go into making a school successful.

We come in and say, well, we’ll put the whole thing together. You just have to give us the authority to tell everybody what to do. And they’re like, “Great.” Then we just set up a relatively simple process, which includes the students, so there’s an educational component to it, and it works. Unfortunately, the law that went into effect in January, which mandates this, diverting for composting has no enforcement mechanism. So it’s a great law. But I’ve had conversations with facility directors from some of these towns, and they’re like, “Yeah, we need to do it … but what happens if we don’t do it?” And then I say, “Well, unfortunately, if you don’t do it, nothing happens.” And then the conversations usually end relatively quickly.

So, what’s been successful for us is, we come in through the bottom; we try to find a person who’s the head of the PTO for that school. And through a personal connection, we say, “Can you get us a meeting with your principal? We want to talk to the principal about this issue. And can you support our effort?” And they’re like, “Yeah, absolutely.”

And then we meet with the principal; we talk about the food-insecure students in their school and the waste that’s right in the school that could solve that problem if we could do something about it. So, we’re really going from the bottom up and not from the top down.

Rob Smith 

Talk a little bit about what you do every day in the school. How does your process work?

Jim Corwin 

The first thing we do is we build a timeline with the principal and usually the assistant principal. And we talk about having to get a forum with the custodians and the food-service staff, and the cafeteria staff. And we have those meetings. We talk to them about what we want to do; we get input from them about what bins they have so we don’t have to go out and buy a lot of bins. It’s a low-tech setup. We talk to the food service provider about any restrictions they might have or concerns they might have about redistributed food. We want to make sure everybody feels comfortable.

Before we mention anything about what we’re doing, we do a survey that was put together by Bryant University for us. And we do an exit survey after we’ve been in a school for a year just to see if we’ve moved the needle there.

But we have data that shows us that we moved the needle as well, because we create awareness about food waste.

We go in and train the rangers with the school administration, how they want to rotate whether all students have a chance to be a cafeteria ranger. We train them and role-play with them, and then we launch in the cafeteria, and we do a food waste audit. And then we are in the cafeteria for two weeks.

Warren Heyman 

To put a little more meat on the bones … We set up a five-step sorting station, and each step has a ranger or a captain at it. The first step is the shared table. So, the shared-table ranger, as the students come down the line, will look on their tray and say, “OK, is that an unopened milk? That looks like an unopened banana or an unopened cheese stick.” And they take the healthy edible food off the tray and put it into a little cooler. They pour any half-drunk milk into the liquid bucket. So, they pour off the liquids. The next station is the recycling bin — for milk cartons, juice cartons, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, aluminum foil. The next stop is the landfill bin … usually what’s left [is] wrappers and that kind of stuff.

Jim Corwin 

You’d be amazed at how little goes into the landfill bin. We reduce cafeteria waste by 80% going to the landfill.

Rob Smith 

So in terms of pounds of waste, how much is that?

Jim Corwin 

Well, it’s quite light, because the only thing that goes to the landfill now are wrappers and plastic spoons and, you know, plastic. It’s very much a modest amount.

Warren Heyman 

So then the next station is the compost bucket. And we have an arrangement with Bootstrap Compost. If we eat it, they take it.

And then the last stop is where they stack the Styrofoam trays because stacked trays, they take up a lot less space.

Jim Corwin 

And we help them convert to reusable trays anytime we can.

Warren Heyman 

As part of this process, we work with the food service provider to try to reduce the amount of waste. So for instance, Sodexo, which has the contract in Providence … We got them to stop putting out these little packets of mustard and ketchup and mayonnaise. Instead, they now have squeeze bottles. So that was a huge help to us. Because all these little plastic packets were ending up in the compost bin.

Jim Corwin 

Rangers get compostable gloves. They have a badge. And they have tongs. And I will tell you, elementary school kids love sorting and love telling other students what to do. Same with middle school until about eighth grade.

Warren Heyman 

At the end of the school year, we do an award ceremony where they all get the certificates. And we bring in the head of the DEM or somebody from the EPA or some local elected officials to participate in the award ceremony.

We’re hopefully changing attitudes so that these kids will go home and change the attitudes of their parents.

Jim Corwin 

We measure everything. We do food waste audits monthly. And that’s fun, because you get to measure, and you look at the components of the waste. The food waste per student, which is total food waste divided by the enrollment of the school over the course of the year … we have seen that come down on our middle schools by 30%. And in our elementary schools by 20%. Our goal is to get that to 50%, and we think we’ll get there before 2030.

Rob Smith 

How many schools are you guys in now?

Warren Heyman 

Well, we’re currently in eight, the city of Providence just got a USDA grant to have us go into four more schools. So that’ll get us to 12. And then we also wrote a large grant at EPA.

Jim Corwin 

We know to scale this up and get this out to all the schools — which we think is not only possible, it’s going to happen — but we need to train facilitators in kind of a “train the trainer” model. And so we’re working on that.

Warren Heyman 

Through that big grant we would double our organization — go from two to four people. Yeah, there’s over 400 public schools in the state. There’s a lot of places we could be running this program.

Jim Corwin 

I recognize there’s kind of a tipping point here. And that is when schools are looking at other schools doing this … and the publicity they’re getting and the great environmental benefit that they are providing. Other schools will want to do it. And so we do expect the phone is going to start ringing. And it has been, I mean … we have more schools than we can even think about working with right now.

Rob Smith 

Sounds like you guys are going to be busy. In most cases, what’s happening when you capture the edible food?

Jim Corwin 

So initially, we started this during the pandemic, and most schools were like, “We don’t want to redistribute that food.” And so it went to food banks within the community. In North Providence, we distributed more than a ton of food our first year to the food bank there.

But as we have seen success in redistributing, we’re focused on that now. And now we only have one of our schools donating to a local food pantry. All the other schools are redistributing, either during lunch or during after-school programs. If you take a tray of bananas, milk, and yogurt, or whatever is leftover out to the lunchroom about 20 minutes into the lunch and offer it to the students, they take it. There’s a lot of kids who don’t get enough to eat right at the lunchroom.

We’ve gotten principals to loosen their restrictions about food outside of the cafeteria. Now food is available in classrooms and in the library. And we’re hoping that as people see the success of that, more schools will be open to allowing that to

Rob Smith 

How much food do you guys capture in the average elementary school?

Jim Corwin 

Our largest had about nine tons of food going to the landfill. When we start, it just comes down.

Warren Heyman 

When we do the weighing, we do the weighing with the student rangers. They help us take the measurements. And then we go into the classroom with the teacher, and we put stuff up on the board. It’s really a math class, but it’s also a science class. How much was the total waste here? And then what percentage is liquid? What percentage is recycling? What percent is trash, etc. And then as Jim said, we do this conversion from OK, so how much carbon would have gone into the air that’s now not going into the air because we’re composting it or we’re eating it?

Rob Smith 

Do you think that engages the students more? Because it’s an actual … it’s not like a like a word problem?

Warren Heyman 

Yeah, yeah. And also, the other thing we do is, is we take a bus trip to the landfill. They see when they throw a piece of trash out at the house or at school, this is where it ends up, unless we’re sorting it through our sorting station, because we really want to educate them about the whole process. And then we send them home with a handout about how to recycle properly. We’re hoping that they take that back home, and then we’re going to affect some change there as well.

Rob Smith 

Do you guys compost, divert your food waste at home?

Jim Corwin 

Yeah, I use Bootstrap’s curbside program.

Warren Heyman 

I grew up just outside New York City, and I’ve composted my entire life.

Rob Smith 

I asked because when I table at events to meet our readers and get story ideas. I ask them what they think is a really big problem with regards to the environment, and a lot of times they say food waste. And then my next question is always, “Do you compost at home?” And the answer is, they’ve either done it their entire lives like I have, or they’ve never done it before in their lives. So that’s why I ask because it’s either something you’ve always done, or it’s just something people don’t pick up.

Warren Heyman 

Apparently only 10% of the country composts. You can get a nice compost bin at Resource Recovery for $45. One of the things that we’re also doing, kind of as a little side project is giving them out to try to promote composting.

Jim Corwin 

There are kitchen units now where you can put your food waste, and it turns it overnight into compost.

Rob Smith 

Going back toward schools, what’s one thing schools could do to divert their waste?

Jim Corwin 

They can download our food waste reduction toolkit for Rhode Island schools, which is on our website, which is a nice guide. It’s got a lot of easy-to-implement strategies. It’s got case studies right here in Rhode Island and from across the country.

Warren Heyman 

They can also go online to YouTube and look at Cafeteria Rangers Crash Course, which is a short video from a school in New York City that’s doing a program similar to ours, led by the students.

Rob Smith 

Is there anything you else you guys wanted to plug or mention before I let you guys go?

Jim, do you want to give the website address or website?

Jim Corwin 

Recycling club.org. And there’s a food waste estimator on it. So, if you’re a school, and you want to see how much food waste you produce and how much recoverable food you produce, all you need is your enrollment.

Rob Smith 

Warren, what about you?

Warren Heyman 

Well, if you’re interested in making this happen, you can call me at 401-486-9139. And I answer all calls. “Hey, we’re interested in making this happen.” So great.

Rob Smith 

A little more direct than I was expecting.

Warren Heyman 

Hey, we’re interested in making this happen.

Rob Smith 

Thank you, guys, for everything you do. Thanks for coming on the show today.

And thanks to our listeners for following along. We want to thank Vanessa Carlton for letting us use her song “Willow” as our theme song, which you hear at the start and end of every episode. We also want to thank Roger Williams University and Professor Bernardo Motta for letting us use their recording studio. Thanks also to Colleen Cronin for producing and to Jo Detz for editing and mixing.

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