Reusable metal lunch trays help Massachusetts school district cut down on food waste
Schools in Needham, Massachusetts have cut down on their food waste by replacing their old cafeteria lunch trays with reusable metal ones and they're already seeing results.
"Food service departments contribute a lot to waste. I'm always looking for new, different ways to reduce," said Director of Nutrition Services Emily Murphy.
Reducing food waste at schools
They found the answer with reusable stainless steel trays. In just a matter of months, they have diverted more than 245,000 single-use trays from landfills.
"Single-use trays was our biggest contributor to waste and also our biggest expense," said Murphy.
It's part of a recent partnership with Brooklyn-based Re:Dish, a company on a mission to replace single-use products in big eating environments like schools.
"In the first week, they went from 18 barrels of trash to six," said Re:Dish founder and CEO Caroline Vanderlip.
Bulk dishware washed and reused
Needham owns the trays but Re:Dish picks up, washes, and returns bulk dishware. Which means there's no need for the school to install industrial dishwashers, or pay people to load them.
"So it's a huge waste reduction measure," said Vanderlip.
Previously, the district used compostable trays that school officials said inevitably ended up in the trash. Murphy said the metal trays also work better.
"It's a larger tray, so students can fit more food on their tray and it's more durable. So a lot of times the compostable ones bend and they're flimsy," said Murphy.
Once students are finished with their lunch, they follow a simple process to discard their waste. They self-sort their trash, from their recycling, from their compostable scraps, before the tray hedas back to the Re:Dish facility, and the cycle begins again.
"What schools allow us to do as a society is teach kids at an early age that throwing everything away after one use doesn't make sense. And even since we started Re:Dish five years ago, I have seen literally a sea change in people's recognition that disposability is not the answer," said Vanderlip.
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