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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by 4th Grade Students, Junior Student Council Members from PSMS 46 Arthur Tappan in Harlem on Local Composting and Food Waste Reduction
2:16:09
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4 min
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Fourth-grade students from PSMS 46 Arthur Tappan in Harlem presented their experiences and initiatives in reducing food waste and implementing local composting solutions. They conducted a waste audit in their school cafeteria, implemented changes to reduce untouched food waste, and partnered with a local composting site to process their food scraps.
- The students discovered that 80% of their cafeteria food waste was untouched, leading them to implement a system where students could choose their food based on USDA rules.
- They partnered with Compost Power to compost 60 pounds of cafeteria food scraps at a nearby NYCHA housing site.
- The students emphasized the importance of local composting for education, community engagement, and reducing the environmental impact of food waste transportation.
4th Grade Student
2:16:09
morning.
2:16:10
Thank you council member Abreu and the sanitation committee for giving the us this chance to speak today.
2:16:17
We are fourth graders from the Junior Student Council, and we represent students from PSMS forty six after Tappan in Harlem.
4th Grade Student
2:16:25
Ready.
2:16:25
We are here to talk about how we reduce face how we reduce food waste with real local solutions for our community.
4th Grade Student
2:16:38
We figured out how to handle our school food waste right in our own neighborhood.
2:16:46
We started a waste audit with cafeteria culture to measure how much food we were throwing away every day in our cafeteria.
2:16:54
And we found out that 80% of our cafeteria food waste was completely untouched.
2:17:00
That means that kids were getting food that they didn't even want.
2:17:06
They were not even taking a single bite and then just throwing it away.
2:17:10
We know that food waste is a problem for the climate, but we learned wasted food is also wasted energy, water, and resources that go into making it.
2:17:23
And instead of being made into compost food that gets put into trash, gets trucked miles away to landfills or incinerators.
4th Grade Student
2:17:33
We learned that even food waste that goes into the brown bins used trucks a lot in its journey.
4th Grade Student
2:17:41
And people who live near the landfill and incinerators have the very polluted air.
2:17:46
For instance, where most of the Manhattan garbage goes to in Newark, New Jersey, 1 In 4 of the kids have asthma.
2:17:56
We decided to reduce our food waste at the Soros Center cafeteria.
2:18:01
We asked the kitchen staff to let students choose what we eat based on USDA rules instead of getting a full tray of food we didn't even ask for.
2:18:13
And at work, after a few days of practicing, we reduced the number of untouched food items in our school by over 50%.
2:18:22
That's a huge difference, but we knew we could do more.
4th Grade Student
2:18:26
Domingo at at Compost Power and Compost Power taught us us a workshop and invited us to composting site in NYCHA House next door to our school.
4th Grade Student
2:18:42
So we brought 60 pounds of our cafeteria food scrap from all lunch periods to nacho to compost it locally.
2:18:52
It is amazing to watch our food scraps turn into something useful instead of being trucked away to another neighborhood.
2:19:01
We can't wait to see our food scraps become compost.
2:19:04
We feel so lucky that Domingo site is so close to us and that we get to be part of the solution.
2:19:11
Now we can teach our families about composting, even though many of us don't have brown bins at home like we do at school.
4th Grade Student
2:19:20
Local composting give us a place to take our food scraps and a way to teach our families and our neighborhoods about composting.
4th Grade Student
2:19:29
We wanna keep leading the way to make these changes permanent in our own school.
2:19:37
And we think other schools who are neighbors with a local compost site should get to compost their own cafeteria food waste too.
2:19:46
We learned that the city council is funding local composting organizations.
2:19:52
Thank you.
2:19:53
Because of local composting, we can take climate action right in our own neighborhood.
4th Grade Student
2:20:00
I hope more kids can do what we what we did so we can make our own soil, our own air, our own neighborhoods, and our own communities healthier with the local composting all over New York City.
4th Grade Student
2:20:14
Thank you for listening.
2:20:17
We we did a very good job.
2:20:21
I hope that you are very people.
2:20:22
If you wanna