Large amounts of waste are created from school lunches, and it needs to be addressed.

For instance, having food students are more likely to eat, reusable, recyclable, or even compostable options and food with less packaging that other schools have implemented.

School lunches often use single-use, disposable products that are just thrown away by students. Manhattan High School uses styrofoam trays, plastic utensils wrapped in more plastic and much of the food students can choose from are packaged in plastic. Hundreds of students throw away these things five days a week for nine months a year again and again.

Then there is the food itself. If you look around at students eating their lunch, it’s easy to find students throwing partially or completely full trays. This is wasteful, but also unhealthy as this means the students aren’t eating lunch. And what about the food that students don’t take, what happens to that? Same with expired items, how much waste does that create? 

I don’t remember school lunches always being so wasteful. Schools used to have reusable trays and better food that students ate and enjoyed instead of tossing away.

Finally, think about the behind the scenes of what most people at the school don’t see. The food has to get to the school somehow, and the answer to that is delivery. Burning more fossil fuels and releasing emissions. On top of this there is also the bulk packaging that creates more waste. Once the food gets to the school, it must be stored properly so nothing goes bad, using even more energy.

School lunches are extremely wasteful and have a big environmental footprint. Schools should be doing more to create an environmentally friendly lunch.