Creating A
Plastic Free Culture! The first Plastic Free Lunch Day (PFLD) was spearheaded by fifty-six PS 15 fifth- graders in Red Hook Brooklyn, as portrayed in Cafeteria Culture’s award-winning student-led movie, Microplastic Madness . On PFLD, students eliminated plastic utensils, drinking cups, and condiment packets. Students conducted a before and after waste audit and on PFLD counted 558 fewer lunchtime single-use plastic items!
https://vimeo.com/361115158
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Nationwide, school cafeterias serve 7.35 billion meals annually , making a large contribution to the global plastic waste stream. School lunches are loaded with single-use plastics, such as plastic wrap, utensils, utensil wrap, cups, lids, bowls, straws, condiment packets, cartons, chip & snack bags, baggies, clamshells and styrofoam trays. Collectively, US school cafeterias have the potential to significantly reduce plastic pollution. Most plastic is not recycled and ends up in landfills or the environment. And because plastic does not biodegrade, it stays around for centuries, endlessly fragmenting into small pieces, first microplastics, then nanoplastics. Plastic pieces now permanently contaminate our soil, water and air. We eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week and we breathe even more. Scientists have found plastic particles in the human placenta, and in our lungs, liver, digestive tract and blood. Plastic food packaging and foodwarer create additional health problems. They leak petrochemical monomers, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants into our food and drink. About 12% of plastic is burned in incinerators where it emits dioxins and other toxic gasses.
Click here to participate and share your plastic free lunch action idea!
USFA is committed to creating a culture within our organization that ensures an
Cafeteria Culture works creatively with youth to achieve equitable zero waste, climate-smart school
equitable experience for all stakeholders and equitable access to healthy school meals for all students. In pursuit of this, we are committed to fostering a diverse workforce, board of directors and membership base and being intentional about including a diversity of voices in school food conversations.
communities and a plastic free biosphere. Our programs foster youth-led solutions by merging citizen science, civic action, media, storytelling and the arts.
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