November 25th to 29th was Humewood's first waste free lunch week of the school year. HEAT, Humewood's Eco Action Team, is going to focus its efforts on promoting waste free lunches for one week each month for the rest of the school year.
The Eco Action Team began promoting the waste free lunch program two weeks before the 25th by creating posters, making announcements, and by putting together a display in the foyer of the school for parents night to help parents understand the initiative and support it. With the start of the waste free lunch program the team began by weighing and auditing the lunch room waste a week before our initiative started, so that we had a baseline for comparison for our waste free lunch weeks in order for us to be able to measure our progress. The students noticed that there was a great deal of recycling and fresh food waste that made its way into the garbage and thus added to our overall refuse weight. Our plan of action is to create signage for students so that they can understand how to most appropriately dispose of waste, for example putting their juice boxes in the recycling instead of the garbage can.
Our kick off waste free lunch week was a success as students started to change the mechanisms with which they brought their lunches and even though we are looking to see improvements during our next weeks we have seen a reduction in waste. We think more communication and clearer signage will truly help our school make a difference.
We saw small changes in behaviour like one student in our kindergarten program that switched from plastic wrapped sandwiches to using a reusable container. It may not have been our biggest victory, but it was a victory, and that helps to inspire us to make further improvements in the coming waste free lunch weeks!
For more ideas on how to create a waste free lunch consider these web-sites:
http://www.wastefreelunch.com/
http://www.wastefreelunches.org/
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/
http://www.epa.gov/osw/education/lunch.htm
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