Advert encouraging students to waste less food.
"there is a better way to say thank you"
Problem
At SPGS kitchen staff weigh food waste that comes off trays during lunchtimes. On average 60-70kg wasted EVERY DAY.
Over all the days we have in school, around half the year, that’s 12,800kg. The same as roughly 9 adult beluga whales.
Our school has tried to tackle this problem before. For example although most food is self-serve, kitchen staff try to cut smaller servings when they do serve. The school has also tried to create lunchtime monitors and put up posters, but none of these hard interventions worked in the long term.
strategies
Last January the St Paul's Environmental Action Committee launched a 'No Food Waste Day', which HALVED the amount of food waste that lunchtime! Unfortunately, then came the weekend and this did not last. Slowly food waste numbers increased again.
To make a permanent impact we devised a Food Waste Scoreboard. This would be a large stiff board which we place outside of the lunch queue, next to the lunch menu. It would display out total food waste from the day before compared to the average of last week and/or last month.
This way, as a school we could track our progress and try to improve our scores.
Winner of the International COP21NudgeChallenge
Password: cleanplate
Experiment
Because we can weigh the food waste every day, we can see in real time how much food is wasted and whether our intervention is working and how we can improve it to get a better result.
If our idea makes a quantifiable impact, we can pass on to other schools- with hard data to prove that it works. So our concept is scalable.
Finally, it's cheap. This isn't rocket science or new technology, it’s a simple idea based in principles from psychology to 'nudge' people into the right direction which is better for our school and planet.
New panini challenge (2016)
Almost every day the school shop closes with some paninis leftover. There is no-one to buy them and no-one to eat them so they get thrown away. It is very hard to find a charity that will accept these fresh paninis as donations… so what can we do?
What is the best way to tackle this?
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Give them away to students for free?
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Have individual students hand them directly to local homeless people?
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Feed them to ducks in a local pond?
We want to see your ideas and considered proposals. Please don’t send over just an idea, explain how it would work. Include weblinks, diagrams and contact the relevant people so that your idea has the best chance of success.