How is marine pollution impacted by schools?

Investigating how we can mitigate our impact on life below water, join us to see how.

Christopher Serrao, Tatiana Hlinka, Bani Meghadri

August 25, 2021

As middle and high schoolers, we saw lots of food wasted in our cafeteria every day. However, we didn't understand the gravity of the situation.

We decided to conduct a food waste audit (after 3 grades of 500 total students finished eating). The amounts were massive after only one day (___).

Then, after understanding how big the problem of food waste in our school was, we wanted to see how much it was in NJ. First, we needed to see how many contributed to this problem (mostly teachers and students). The purple points on the map are listed schools and the orange and blue squares mark school districts.

In NJ, alone, there is over 1.28 million students in school along with 129,000 teachers. Globally, the US has 56.4 million students with 3.7 million teachers. Over a school year, a high school produces around 48 lbs of trash per student. An elementary schools doubles that amount!

How does this waste problem happen?

Understanding Mindsets

To understand how this waste problem happens, we need to think as the perspective of an average student eating lunch in the cafeteria. To help us get to know this better, we used the systems thinking iceberg. At the top, the events are lots of waste in the cafeteria from many different forms (plastic waste, half eaten lunches thrown out etc). Underneath it are the patterns, when people don’t finish eating they throw it out constantly, and feel no incentive to take it home. Underlying structures in place are the lack of education towards reducing, recovering and recycling waste as well as the onus being on the consumer to know and care about where they are putting their waste. And lastly, there are the mental models in place, an overall theme of not caring and wanting to take care of the school waste problem because they aren’t experiencing the consequences first hand nor having to take care of the waste themselves.