The Angevine Middle School CAP class recognizes that one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases is food waste, and they decided to do something about it. From giving out recipes and ingredients to low-income families, to turning tired Thanksgiving leftovers into delicious meals, to performing a rap and making a mural to educate their peers, these students are putting their learning into action. The students told the story of their project:
Food waste is a big problem. About 925 million people are starving, but every year we waste enough food to feed 3 billion people.
For our class this year we decided to focus on food waste, we decided this because most people in our class are interested in food and like it. Food waste is bad for the environment because when it goes to a landfill it produces a large amount of methane. Methane gets trapped in the atmosphere and causes global warming. Reducing waste helps the environment because it makes less methane in the atmosphere.
One problem people have with food waste is that people don’t know how to dispose of it, the best way to dispose of food waste is to give it to people in need, donating food to homeless shelters. The second-best way to get rid of food waste is to feed livestock or donate it to local farms. If you can’t do any of these things then compost it. The worst way is to put it in the trash or landfill.
For our project some people are making a worm bin: you put food into the bin and the worms eat it and turn it into the soil. You can put food that would be wasted and the worms will eat it. Another thing we are doing is making smoothies out of leftover food from the school cafeteria. They are going to be made of food that would be otherwise thrown away.
Some of us are painting a mural in our school cafeteria. The mural is a giant apple core in a landfill. This apple core symbolizes food thrown away that livestock could have been eaten or that could have been fertilizer for crops. Instead, it was wasted and eventually turns into carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change, which is a huge problem in the world today. Other people in the class wrote a rap song about food waste.
Skills that we are learning are: cooking skills and how to talk to other people about the environment and food waste. We’ve learned how to solve environmental problems instead of just wishing they would go away. We’ve also learned how to connect with each other and work together.
Written by Angevine Middle School CAP students Kanat, Jose, James, Owen and Sergio
See more photos from the Angevine CAP class here!
CAP at Centaurus High School is made possible in part by a grant from Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) through the Nature Kids/Jovenes de la Naturaleza program. Click here to learn more!
