How these students cut their school's food waste by 57%
Also: A prescription from your doctor could give you free access to nature
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This week:
- How these students cut their school's food waste by 57%
- The Big Picture: Top new species of 2024?
- How to get a prescription for free access to national parks, conservation areas
How these students cut their school's food waste by 57%
While eating lunch at her school cafeteria, Dyanne Jiang watched classmates leave the table with plates still covered in food.
"My friend would be like, 'Okay, I can't eat this anymore,'" she recalled. "They would just get up and try to, like, throw it out, right?... It just kind of felt wrong to me."
Jiang, now in Grade 11 at Appleby College, in Oakville, Ont., learned that a third of all food produced ends up wasted or lost, and uneaten food generates 10 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.
"When you think about it on a global scale, that's huge," Jiang said.
After taking part in a program put on by the non-profit Climate Action Accelerator, which pushes organizations to halve their emissions by 2030 or earlier, she and schoolmate Myra Datta decided to target lunch food waste at their school.
Appleby College is a private day and boarding school with more than 800 students in Grades 7 to 12. All of them participate in a hot lunch program included in their tuition fees.
Jiang and Datta learned from the school's director of food services that 94 per cent of food waste at the school came from food that was served, but not eaten — more than 600 kilograms per month from lunch alone.
The pair started doing monthly presentations to their classmates about why food waste is a problem, and what they can do to help solve it, including taking a smaller portion if they're trying a new food for the first time.
Jiang said that kind of marketing was "a very, very big part" of the solution. They set goals for cutting waste and stationed volunteers at food waste bins encouraging people to waste less using written signs and verbal messaging. When goals were met, they rewarded students with treats such as ice cream sandwiches.
They also looked for ways to make sure students' plates weren't overloaded with more than they could eat.
Nicola St. George, one of their teachers and the school's director of sustainability and regeneration, said training kitchen staff to serve smaller portions is what worked best.
Jiang and Datta's "WasteZero" project cut monthly lunch food waste at the school by 360 kilograms or 57 per cent between September 2023 and June 2024 – from 629.81 kg to 269.28 kg – avoiding nearly 700 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions, reported the Halton Environmental Network, which recognized the team for their efforts.
They continue to set monthly goals, and are now trying to share their knowledge with other schools.
Not a lot of other schools have universal hot lunch programs like this right now, although the federal government has promised a new national school food program to begin by the end of the school year.
But even schools where students bring lunch boxes can help reduce food waste.
Kristen Malec leads the circular living program at the Green Action Centre, a non-profit group in Winnipeg focused on waste reduction and sustainable transportation. A few years ago, it ran a food-waste program specifically targeting schools, encouraging them to start food waste reduction projects.
"Kids are a lot more impressionable," Malec said. "They have less biases when it comes to teaching them about environmental issues. And hopefully they can bring that home to their parents and maybe convince or guilt their parents into making small changes in their lives and their households."
Tara Tuchscherer is a social studies teacher at St. James Collegiate in Winnipeg who took part in the Green Action Centre program. She said students in many schools, including her own, are struggling with food insecurity, and that colours her own feelings about food waste.
She teaches about it in all her classes — calling attention not just to individual food waste and solutions, but also to food waste across society. She has offered students fruit she bought using the FlashFood app, which sells food from grocery stores approaching their best-before date at a discount, and taken them to see rescued food distributed to community groups by the Leftovers Foundation. She hopes students see how this applies in their own lives, and that food waste is a problem that can be fixed: "Everybody has a role in this."
Jiang has a similar message, after seeing the growing impact of Appleby College's WasteZero project: "Even the smallest actions can build up to something huge, right?"
— Emily Chung
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Check out our podcast and radio show. In our newest episode: Sometimes the truth hurts. And when it comes to fighting climate change, we have obstacles ahead — including the likely reality that global temperatures in 2024 will hit 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. That's even before Donald Trump's return to the White House could bring a big shift in climate policies. But that doesn't mean the fight is over. David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaii, explains what the next goal should be and how we could get there.
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Reader feedback
Thanks to everyone who took our end-of-year quiz in our last issue – we hope you had fun.
One of the questions (and answers) concerned district heating – a single, large heating system for an entire neighbourhood instead of smaller, individual systems that each heat one home. Jorma Ikavalko of Alliston, Ont., wrote: "How many district heating installations are there in Canada? It would help a lot to try and convince our town council to use district heating in future developments."
The most complete list we could find was the District Energy Inventory maintained by the Canadian Energy and Emissions Data Centre at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.
Write us at whatonearth@cbc.ca. (And feel free to send photos too!) We'd also love to hear about any New Year's resolutions you have to make your life a little greener in 2025.
The Big Picture: Van Gogh's new gecko
This tiny lizard was found in the South Western Ghats, a mountain range in India. In announcing the discovery in March, Ishan Agarwal, a researcher with the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation, said its back reminded researchers of a famous work by 19th-century Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. "The striking colouration of the new species is reminiscent of one of his most iconic paintings, The Starry Night." The description of the new species, officially named Cnemaspis vangoghi, was published in the journal ZooKeys. Its publisher, Pensoft, gave it the No. 1 spot on its list of top 10 new species of 2024. Pensoft says they were chosen from new species described in its journals and not based on any particular criteria, but were "entirely arbitrary" and "a fun way" to look back on the weird and wonderful discoveries of the year. You can check out more of the new species of 2024 here.
— Emily Chung
Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web
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There aren't as many fish in the sea as there used to be, and fish farming in pens has created its own problems. So China is trying another approach to supplying seafood — marine ranching, which involves releasing juvenile fish into artificial reefs and kelp forests in the open ocean.
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A third of Americans don't drive. In an interview with Yale Climate Connections, author Anna Zivarts gives us a closer look at who those people are, and why assuming everyone drives is such a big problem.
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Faith organizations can be really efficient at delivering relief after climate disasters. That has prompted many government agencies to partner with them to supply aid. But that means help sometimes comes with a serving of religion.
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Are spills of toxic tailings being cleaned up in Alberta's oilsands? The Alberta Energy Regulator says yes in a public database. It also claims it does routine inspections to make sure. But that info is at odds with its internal reports, which show 91 per cent are never inspected, a new study finds.
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The winds are changing in the United Kingdom — at least, with how it gets its power. Wind accounted for 30 per cent of the UK's electricity generation in 2024. Together with hydro, nuclear and solar, more than half of Great Britain's electricity is powered by renewable sources.
How to get a prescription for free access to national parks, conservation areas
Since 2020, Canadians have been able to get prescriptions from their doctors for free access to natural places such as national parks.
Now some Ontario conservation areas have been added to the list. Halton Healthcare and Conservation Halton in Ontario announced in early December they were partnering with a B.C.-based foundation to offer free visits to their local nature parks.
"Accessing nature, walking through the fresher air, standing and being able to listen to the birds … put the phones down or leave [it] in the car and, just be disconnected for even 30 minutes it's so important," said Craig Machan, director of parks and operations at Conservation Halton.
Machan said 75 per cent of nature prescriptions written are for mental health.
But how does it work?
Any licensed health-care professional in Canada can give out nature prescriptions, "from nurses to physicians to physiotherapists," according to the PaRx website.
Dr. Stephen Chin, interim vice president for medical affairs at Halton Healthcare, said health-care providers will need to register with PaRx to give out the prescription.
After registering and getting a code, they will be able to give out the prescription through their clinic and add their provider code, Chin said.
As for patients looking to get a prescription, Chin said there's a "pretty low bar" to be prescribed nature, meaning the prescription will be "freely given" to most.
"I mean, there's almost no reason why someone should not be more physically active," he said.
After a patient gets the prescription, they'll have to go to either the PaRx website or in some cases, their local partner — for instance, the Conservation Halton website — and fill out a form where they'll be asked for some basic information and the provider code.
If the patient is on the Conservation Halton website, they'll be sent an email with a code they can use for 10 free visits to a Conservation Halton park.
If patients fill out the form on the PaRx website, they must also select which park or conservation area they wish to visit.
Some patients could also be prescribed a year's worth of unlimited visits to "over 80 national parks, national historic sites and national marine conservation areas," with the Parks Canada Discovery Pass, which providers can only give out once a month.
Other PaRx program partners include Conservation Toronto, the Toronto Zoo, and the Canadian Museum of Nature.
Machan said Conservation Halton is the first outside of national parks to give free day-use access to their parks.
Patients who choose Conservation Halton for their nature prescription can get up to 10 free visits to one of its parks. The region in the Greater Toronto Area includes Burlington, Oakville, Milton and Halton Hills.
Machan emphasized the importance of being in nature, even when it's cold out.
"Winter can be a dark time for a lot of people," he said, so being able to spend some time outside and disconnect from the pressures of daily life can make a big difference, he added.
Chin said walking outside for 20 minutes "can make a big difference in our health by triggering a drop in our cortisol levels."
He also said spending time in nature can improve mental health, lower blood pressure, and "even [extend] life expectancy."
"Hopefully, it's a trigger toward having a healthier lifestyle altogether for them, and it's a starting point for many," he said.
The PaRx program was started by the B.C. Parks Foundation, an independent non-profit organization and charitable foundation.
Jennie McCaffrey, vice president of health and education at the B.C. Parks Foundation, said the program is now available in every province and any health-care provider can give out the nature prescription.
She said the program was started not just to connect people to nature, but also to advance conservation.
"It's been really proven that when people are connected to nature, they're more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours for the long-term," she told CBC Hamilton.
McCaffrey said the foundation is hoping that integrating nature into daily life becomes a "social norm," and the "fourth pillar of health."
"We want people getting their time in nature, the same as they're trying to get eight hours of sleep at night and eat a healthy balanced diet and get the exercise they need," she said.
— Aura Carreño Rosas
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Editors: Emily Chung and Hannah Hoag | Logo design: Sködt McNalty
