HEFN

Cafeteria Culture (CafCu), founded in 2009 as Styrofoam Out of Schools (www.SOSnyc.org), catalyzed the incredible launch of TRAYLESS TUESDAYS  throughout all of NYC’s 1700 public schools in March 2010 through an innovative partnership with New York City (NYC) Department of Education (DoE) SchoolFood.  Since then, an impressive 40 million styrofoam trays have been eliminated from production, school lunches, incinerators and landfills at no additional cost to the city. 

Most recently, CafCu organized a series of meetings at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with parents, manufacturers, NGOs and government agencies resulting in an ongoing national EPA webinar series on reducing school waste that has already reached over 100 municipalities. 

NYC public schools have been throwing “away” almost 4,250,000 harmful styrofoam trays per week (well over 3 billion since the 1990s), especially threatening low income students who regularly eat hot food directly off them. Innovations in cutting school food waste, piloting alternatives to single-use disposables, alternative methods of messaging change, and engaging cafeteria communities, are urgently needed to reduce environmental toxins, greenhouse gas emissions, and rising costs of NYC’s waste disposal. 

Through sheer scale and purchasing power, DoE SchoolFood can influence waste reduction trends in manufacturing and government, while also shifting societal habits for economic and ecological benefits.