By Joel Sandoval, Senior at Solorio Academy HS, Chicago Public Schools; Zero Waste Ambassador
At Eric Solorio Academy High School, part of the Chicago Public School system, the Zero Waste Ambassadors club is interested in learning more about the environment and taking action to make the school more sustainable. This past November, these students rolled out their very first Plastic Free Lunch Day, a day dedicated to reducing plastic waste as much as possible during lunch periods.
For this day, Zero Waste members asked lunch staff to reduce some of the most common plastics we found in our daily lunches. Our cafeteria staff replaced condiment packets by utilizing squeeze bottles of each sauce, served unwrapped sandwiches and fruits, and served finger foods to reduce student usage of plastic utensils. Members also spread the information of Plastic Free Lunch Day to the general student population through morning announcements to try to get students to bring reusable containers to school instead of single-use plastics.
As a part of this project, students wanted to have some data on the problem to see how impactful the plastic-free lunch was. In order to collect single-use plastic waste data, members tallied the amount of each single-use plastic that was disposed during lunch hours in a regular lunch day and in the Plastic Free Lunch Day. Most of the single-use plastics (on a normal lunch day) were made up of condiment packets, accounting for up to 60 percent of the total plastics, followed by utensils and utensil wrappers (see Plastic Type Breakdown). Overall, results demonstrated a reduction in the amount of single-use plastics thrown away during the Plastic Free Lunch Day, cutting the waste by half during a regular school lunch day.
However, the project presented itself with challenges. On Plastic Free Lunch Day, the general student population was not well-informed about the event so the day was not as impactful as we had hoped. Also, we still had a number of single-use plastics during the lunch period.
With the knowledge gained from doing Plastic Free Lunch Day, Solorio Zero Waste aims to do the event again on Earth Day, dedicating more time and effort to reducing the challenges from the previous event by communicating with students in their advisories and having them sign a “Plastic-Free Pledge” during lunch in the days leading up the event.
Hopefully our next go will be even more of a success!