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From Food Blooms Flowers
San Francisco is taking an innovative approach to dealing
with their lunchroom food waste. Through the city's Food to
Flowers! program, young students learn how to compost their
leftover lunches and the many uses for compost. The comprehensive
school lunchroom composting program was created in 2000 and
is managed by San
Francisco's Department of the Environment 
.
"Food to Flowers! gives students a big picture and motivates
them to take action," explains Tamar Hurwitz, environmental
education manager at the San Francisco Department of the Environment.
The Food to Flowers! program introduces students to composting during a school assembly with the help of the program's mascot, Phoebe the Phoenix. In addition to learning about the recycling method, the students learn about the composting process and how their actions can not only improve their lawns and gardens, but also the environment. Large, green carts are placed in school lunchrooms where students can toss all the appropriate leftover food scraps from their lunches. These compostable food scraps may include fruits, vegetables, meats, cheese, bread, dirty paper napkins, and empty milk cartons.
A local waste hauler takes the carts filled with the lunch scraps to a nearby composting facility. At the facility, high-quality organic compost is created and sold to local farms and wineries. Some of the compost is also given back to the schools for use in their gardens.
Food to Flowers! encourages schools to set a goal of recycling and composting 50 percent of their waste, and many of the 60 participating schools are exceeding that goal. Sunset Elementary, for example, owes its exceptional success to the commitment and involvement of the school administration. Students are encouraged to care about composting and feel proud that they are making a difference. The Food to Flowers! program also produces significant financial savings through reduced garbage fees for the school district.
Food to Flowers! has ambitious, nationwide goals to transform composting from an eco-friendly abstraction to a common practice. "Composting is to the millennium what recycling was to the 80s," says Hurwitz. To promote program growth outside of San Francisco, Food to Flowers! encourages all interested counties, cities, and states to use its development model.
Like Food to Flowers!, we are making our own efforts to encourage the public to divert organic waste from landfills and incinerators. We recently developed a food waste diversion hierarchy that shows Americans the many options that can replace disposal (see below). Furthermore, our Waste-Free Lunch program teaches students how to reduce, reuse, and recycle items in their school lunches and how to organize a waste-free lunch day at their school.
The Food to Flowers! program and the Waste-Free Lunch program exemplify activities encouraged by our Resource Conservation Challenge within the national priority area of Municipal Solid Waste and Recycling.
Food Hierarchy
EPA's food waste hierarchy is designed to show Americans the many options that can replace disposal.
- Source Reduction – Reduce the volume of food waste generated
- Feed People – Donate extra food to food banks, soup kitchens and shelters
- Feed Animals – Provide food to farmers
- Industrial Uses – Provide fats for rendering and food discards for animal feed production
- Composting – Convert food scraps into a nutrient rich soil amendment
- Landfill/Incineration – Last resort for disposal
For More Information:
- Food
to Flowers! Program Brochure (PDF)
(2 pp, 141K, about
PDF)
- San
Francisco Environment's School Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot
Web page
provides program materials and information for teachers,
as well as ways to get involved.
- EPA's Waste Free Lunch
- EPA's Composting Web site
- EPA's Resource Conservation Challenge National Priority Area - Municipal Solid Waste and Recycling Web page.