What teachers say

My fifth grade class measured the milk wasted in our cafeteria last Friday at both breakfast and lunch. We even strained the cereal! We had 10 full gallon plastic milk jugs at the end of the last lunch period. According to the cook's tally we missed 20 cartons, as we tallied the milk cartons also. A lesson learned as that day the lunch was a sack lunch and not served on trays as is the usual procedure. That no doubt accounted for our 20 missing cartons. There were 2 trash bags of nothing but milk cartons that went to the landfill that day also. This totals up to 356 trash bags of milk cartons in the landfill from just our school each year.

According to my student's calculations, this is what we decided the wasted milk would add up to if this was an average amount of milk wasted each day:
10 gallons / day 50 gallons / week 200 gallons / month 1,780 gallons / year

In terms of cartons, we would be able to fill the following number of cartons with this amount of wasted milk:
160 cartons / day 800 cartons / week 3,200 cartons / month 28,480 cartons / year

We then checked the UN web site on nutrition and learned that 6 million children in the world under the age of 5 die each year from hunger. This is roughly twice the population of the state of Iowa. In another source we read that 9% of the food we purchase is wasted. This was rather mind boggling for all of us. We are now in the process of collecting and building a pyramid with 160 milk cartons recycled from the cafeteria and creating posters for the lunchroom. We decided the data we collected would have more of an impact if we shared it with more people…--Beth Sandstrom, 5th grade, Wilkins Elementary, Linn-Mar Community Schools, Marion, Iowa