For those of you who have children in school, concepts such as recycling, saving energy, going green, and environmental factors have probably been taught to your children. However, are such concepts always demonstrated by these institutions? My good friend Dina Mustafa, working toward her Masters in Sustainability Management at Columbia University and The Earth Institute has written an op-ed piece regarding the discrepancy. Today, I'm sharing it on Nuggets of Knowledge:
Disposable Trays...What I Have Learned from my Children
By: Dina Mustafa
I have three kids, in three different schools in the same town in New Jersey. Mariam, 14 attends Westwood Junior High School. Muhammed 11, attends Westwood Middle School, and Noor 6, the baby in the family and she’s in Kindergarten.
Every month I get the lunch calendar from the school district and look through for any healthy options. Most of the time the food offered is junk with the occasional salad or vegetable chili. Even with my work schedule and the day to day craziness of a typical family, I’ve always tried to send them off with a well balanced lunch box instead of depending on the school lunch. There are days however, when I’ve had to just close my eyes and hand over the money for a school lunch because life can’t always be well planned.
When I started writing this piece, it was going to be about the nutritional value of the school lunch program, a subject that has been at the forefront of many school board discussions. It has even gotten significant media coverage lately.
I mentioned this to my oldest daughter, Mariam, who looked at me and said, “Mom, but what about the trays?”
“What about them?” I replied
“Do you remember the petition I had everyone sign last year?” she asked "At least we have salads sometimes, but we throw away the trays, so I wanted them to change that. They used reusable trays before, didn’t they?”
My 14 year old was more aware than I was. This embarrassed me and made me proud at the same time. Our conversations lead me to research the problem of the disposable Styrofoam tray used in schools.
PHOTO: KAI HENDRY
To understand the impact of the problem, we have to first understand the danger of Styrofoam. Unlike the old days when many school cafeterias offered reusable trays, the early 1990s saw a rising trend in the United States to provide students with disposable polystyrene (trade name: Styrofoam) trays that are used once, typically for less than 30 minutes. From there, most of the trays end up clogging landfills or posing a litter problem. Polystyrene, is impossible to compost, difficult to recycle and is one of the predominant features of litter-filled beaches, and trash-based oceans. The EPA report on solid waste named the polystyrene manufacturing process as the 5th largest creator of hazardous waste. The National Institute of Standards Center for Fire Research identified 57 chemical byproducts released during the combustion of polystyrene foam. The process of making polystyrene pollutes the air and creates large amounts of liquid and solid waste.
That night I sat with my kids and tried to estimate how many Styrofoam trays are being thrown out each day, and in each school year, within our school system alone. This is what we came up with.
There are approximately 2000 children in our school system, and about 75% buy lunch. These numbers include underprivileged children who are offered a free lunch and children who have working parents to whom a school lunch makes the morning routine easier. This means that about 1,500 trays get used each day. With a 180 day school year, my small town school system contributes 270,000 Styrofoam trays to landfills each year. According to the grassroots group SOSnyc.org and earthresource.org, 850,000 Styrofoam trays are trashed in New York City public schools every day. At 80 trays per foot, the daily stack is two miles high, 8.5 times the height of the Empire State Building.
Looking at these numbers made me think of what the school is teaching my kids. On one hand, even my youngest one comes home from school with slogans like “Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse”. The kids are the recycle police at my house and are always more vigilant then my husband and me. I’ve learned from them just as they’ve learned from their schools; to be aware of what they throw out, to close the faucet when brushing their teeth and switch off the lights when leaving the room. Yet these same schools don’t practice what they preach. How then can children understand the gravity of the situation, when the same school that teaches them to respect their planet encourages them to throw it away?
I’m now even more proud of my daughter for putting together the petition, and for having the ability to see the future of her planet in a disposable tray.
