Cleaning up their Act

Chicago Schools Pile up Lunch Waste


Chicago Public Schools throw out almost a quarter of a million lunch and breakfast trays made out of polystyrene foam, that's almost 1 million a week. The problem is that none of these trays are being recycled, and the school is polluting the earth with 5 million of these trays-a month. Well, the kids at Prosser Career Academy decided to do something about this. They realized the problem with sending all of these trays to the land fill, the fact that they will never disintegrate. That means that even as these kids continue to graduate and move on, their carton that held their nachos from a Thursday will still be sitting in a landfill. The Prosser students decided that their district needed to do something about their impact, but what they do is up for debate. There are also is more than one reason for getting rid of the tray. A group called No Foam Chicago asked the district to eliminate the trays for health reasons as well as the environment. Styrene, which is in the tray, can come out of the trays and into heated food. Districts in other states have also tried to address this problem by eliminating the trays once a week, and this helps save 820,000 from the landfill each time; while others found that their city was willing to pick up the trays and recycle them each time. These programs have not been instituted in Chicago, and the option of using reusable trays is too expensive, even though the school pays a fee of about 5 million dollars each year in waste management fees. Another option is to buy biodegradable trays, but this too is very expensive. The article never articulated what Prosser High school and other Chicago schools chose, but hopefully they are making a change to better impact the earth.

The fact that students initiated this realization shows that how impacted our generation is by pollution. We are trying to fix problems created by past generations. We're lucky that our school has trays and a recycling program that helps our school be more eco friendly. I didn't realize though, that our cafeteria doesn't really have a recycling plan. We have garbage bins and garbage bins to recycle cans- no plastic or paper of any kind. For the most part though, those cans go into the garbage with the rest of our lunch. I think that we should look into being more eco friendly within our own vicinities. Hopefully our own school can create a program that is too, entirely environmentally conscious.
Eng, Monica. "Chicago Schools Pile up Lunch Waste." Chicago Tribune. Chicago Tribune. 7 Feb. 2010. 8 Feb 2010. <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-met-school-lunch-waste-20100207,0,5604002.story>