ReGrow: 6.3 tons of lunch

Every school year, my school throws away about 6.3 tons of food. That number is where Regrow started.

Zoom out and it gets bigger. The US wastes around 66 million tons of food a year, and in schools, up to 53% of food ends up in the trash.

Our idea was a student-led composting program. Students sort and compost cafeteria waste themselves, the compost goes back into the school garden, and the teaching starts in lower school, so composting is a habit before anyone has to think about it. We summed up what it builds in three words: leadership, responsibility, planet.

Before we settled on that, we interviewed stakeholders and looked at what already exists. Some programs compost on site. Some collect food waste and haul it away. Some just teach. We wanted one that did all of it and put students in charge.

To make it something other schools could adopt, we priced it as an annual subscription of $1,250 per school. That covers teaching materials, bins and charts, progress tracking, and the composting itself. The plan was to launch at our own school, then expand across Florida and partner with sustainability organizations.