Plastic Free Lunch Day (PFLD)

June 9, 2022

ALL TOGETHER NOW!  

P.S. 971 School of Math, Science, and Health Living – a school inspired by PLASTIC FREE LUNCH DAY!  

The first ever Plastic Free Lunch Day (PFLD) in NYC public schools happened on May 16th. All over the city, students joined the Office of Food and Nutrition Services (OFNS) in a  monumental effort to create as little single-use plastic waste as possible. And it was a huge success; some students even called the day spectacular! 

The effort was brought about through a partnership between OFNS and NYC-based environmental education organization, Cafeteria Culture. During PFLD, elementary schools with onsite kitchens received plastic-free lunch service, with no plastic packaging and or utensils used during the school-provided lunch.  

To measure the impact of PFLD, many schools conducted plastic waste audits to compare their plastic waste on PFLD to regular days. This data is critical to pushing us closer to eliminating single-use plastic waste from lunch service. As Robert Markuske, Sustainability Coordinator and Instructor of Marine Policy and Advocacy at the New York Harbor Schools, says to his students, “You can’t change what you can’t measure.”  

Here’s how Plastic Free Lunch Day went down at one Brooklyn elementary school.: 

Preparations for Plastics Free Lunch Day (PFLD) at PS 971 began in April when founding Principal, Dr. Ruth Stanislaus, and Dr. Kerri Durante, Science Specialist D20 STEAM Coach, met to schedule school-wide PFLD-themed school events. 

Two weeks before PFLD, Dr. Durante taught all K971 students about single use plastics, helping her scholars understand the harmful impact plastics pose to humans and wildlife. Students learned about the many everyday items they use that contain plastic, as well as about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a gyre of marine debris particles and microplastics in the central North Pacific Ocean. Learning about plastic waste in the ocean just before PFLD inspired the school community to action. 

With support from GrowNYC Zero Waste Schools, Dr. Durante and her student Green Team conducted two plastic waste audits using our Plastic Waste Audit guide. This data would be compared with data from PFLD to see just how much plastic was reduced. Here are some steps they took to ensure their data was accurate: 

  • Before and during the audits the Green Team and Dr. Durante spoke with OFNS staff; they also worked with the school aides and peers to make sure everyone was on board with the audits.  

  • The Green Team used Cafeteria Culture’s Data Collection sheet to record the quantities and types of single-use plastics at lunch. 

  • Green Team members took photos during the audit, capturing the many soft and hard plastics that are used as food packaging. The photographs recorded their process, the plastics that they observed, and the data collected.  

During the first audit, the Green Team noticed a lot of uneaten recoverable food, which led them to create the school’s first share table in the cafeteria! They also wanted to address the plastic Ziplock bags and single use water bottles they observed, so they requested reusable snack bags and water bottles from GrowNYC Zero Waste Schools for students who did not have them. Additionally, the school held, “Bring your own Reusable Utensil Day,” and families were given a cost comparison of a zero-waste lunch (using reusable containers) vs. packing single-serve disposable lunch and snack options.  

On Plastic Free Lunch Day (PFLD) May 16, 2022! 

The Office of Food and Nutrition Services (OFNS) team at PS 971 was ready to go! Using the OFNS video from Cafeteria Culture to prep, they successfully served a lunch meal without unnecessary single-use plastics! Congratulations to the OFNS team at P.S. 971 – Vinny Farrauto, Hugo Bonita, school cook, Tony Ruiz, and OFNS manager Dana Hickley.  

Created by CafeteriaCulture.org in partnership with NYC Department of Education Office of Food and Nutrition Services and Office of Sustainability. This video shows you how to prepare the PLASTIC FREE LUNCH DAY MENU for
Monday May 16th!

(You can click the time code below to jump to each part)
00:38 PIZZA
02:01 PEANUT BUTTER & JELLY or SUNFLOWER BUTTER SANDWICHES
04:50 CHEESE SANDWICHES
07:04 BROCCOLI
08:36 ORANGES
09:58 SALAD BAR


Thank you for helping to make PLASTIC FREE LUNCH DAY a success!
Next, watch Plastic Free Lunch Day - get ready, NYC schools! https://vimeo.com/695683120


More info at www.plasticfreelunch.org

Here are some key actions the school took: 

  • At the OFNS flavor station, individual sauce packets were replaced with a large reusable squeeze bottles filled with dressing.  

  • Announcements were made in the morning and during lunch reminding everyone it was PFLD. 

  • Students and staff brought in their reusable utensils and bottles to school. 

The Green Team made sure to conduct another plastic waste audit to capture all this reduction and guided their peers on what to sort during lunchtime. Their results showed that OFNS lunch service created significantly less plastic waste. For instance, they recorded 93 utensil wrappers during the first audit and 161 during the second; but on Plastic Free Lunch Day, they noticed the number of utensil wrappers used reduced to 0. Check out more of their findings below: 

Item Before PFLD (May 5) Before BFLD (May 10) On PFLD (May 16)
Utensil Wrapper 93 161 0
Plastic condiment wrapper 5 128 3
Food Wrapper 5 108 5
Plastic cup 206 230 57

When Dr. Durante and the Green Team looked at their month of outreach and education about reducing plastic waste, they reported some other key takeaways: 

  • Their cafeteria share table is a great and simple way to reduce food loss and provide food to those who need it. 

  • Many students continued to bring their reusable utensils. 

  • After distributing reusable bottles, there was less single-use plastic bottle waste. 

  • Plastic Free Lunch Day was fun even if it was just for one day. 

There is more work to be done, like getting rid of plastic cups by the water station, sauce packets, prepackaged utensil packets. So, they are using their Green Team meetings to further their cafeteria plastic waste advocacy project. 

Check out some images of the P.S. 971 school team in action

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The first-ever Plastic Free Lunch Day took a lot of planning and preparation, and we’ve heard from many schools wanting to continue reducing single-use plastics in their building. Here’s how: 

  1. Conduct a plastic waste audit using our Plastic Waste Audit Guide.  

  1. Calculate how many pieces of plastic your school creates in a week, or a month or year with our Plastic Waste Data Graph Sheet. This will blow your students minds. 

  1. Request OFNS reduces specific plastic items in cafeteria.  

  1. Work with your school cook or School Food Manager to replace condiment packets (ex. ketchup packets, salad dressing) with condiment dispensers or squeeze bottles. Using data about how many packets are used each day/week/month will help to make your case!  

  1. Involve OFNS staff in discussions about other ways to reduce plastic. Page 6 of our Plastic Waste Audit Guide contains a handy script to empower students to take on a leadership role in building a collaborative relationship with OFNS staff.   

  1. Launch an awareness campaign to involve your entire school community in plastic-free action. Use our Take Action! materials. 

  1. Encourage your school community to quench their thirst with reusable water bottles. This simple step will have an incredible impact on your school’s single- use plastic waste stream. 

  1. Encourage teachers and parents to continue taking other plastic- free action like hosting a zero-waste week in which they consolidate their efforts towards reducing plastics to see how much impact they can have in one week. Use this awareness campaign guide to get started. 

  1. Be sure your end- of -year celebrations are zero-waste with this End  of Year Celebrations video. And come to our How to Close Out the School Year Waste-Free  workshop on Wed. June 15 to learn more.  

  1. Encourage parents to pack a zero-waste lunch. Here ‘s our simple guide; share it with your PTA.  

These resources are available in the Get Ready For Plastics Free Lunch Day Resource Folder 

Congratulations to Cafeteria Culture, OFNS, and all the NYC schools who participated in the first ever Plastic Free Lunch Day!  

Healthy Kids, Healthy Schools

March 11, 2013


GrowNYC formed a partnership with Wagner Middle School in Manhattan called Healthy Kids, Healthy Schools, funded by NYC Council Member Jessica Lappin. Under one roof, we are providing support from five GrowNYC programs: Learn It Grow It Eat It, Grow to Learn School Gardens, Greenmarket Youth Education, Recycling Champions and Environmental Education. For an entire year, GrowNYC staff is educating young people about how to lead lives that improve their personal health and that of the environment around them; so that eating, growing, learning and going green become second nature.

On the recycling front, we recently helped Wagner launch a school-wide cafeteria recycling program – 1,200 students in grades 6-8 sorted everything from trays to milk cartons, placing them in their proper containers with help from dozens of student volunteers and Green Team members. 1,200 students recycling milk cartons for one year will save 31 trees!

To keep it fun, grades are competing to see who can reduce their overall waste – on a weekly basis, the amount of waste will be calculated and the winning grade announced on Fridays. At the end of every month, the grade that has reduced waste and recycled the most will receive special “Out-Lunch” privileges. Wagner has averaged a daily reduction of 9 bags of garbage or 17%, while generating an extra bag of recyclables.

The contest, designed by the Green Team, was the culmination of an outreach campaign they undertook to educate their classmates. Working with their advisor, teacher and sustainability coordinator Jessica Gordon, students created posters, morning announcements, and a PowerPoint. The success of the program could not have been possible without the support and help of Wagner’s administration and staff.

Featured Grow to Learn Garden: Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, & Engineering

September 5, 2012
Posted in Community Gardens | Tagged grow to learn

Grow to Learn NYC: the Citywide School Gardens Initiative was established in 2010 as a public-private partnership between GrowNYC, The Mayor’s Fund, and several government agency partners. Grow to Learn profiles successful school gardens in their monthly newsletter The School Gardens Beet. The September profile appears below. It was a week before the school year officially began yet Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science & Engineering (CSS-MSE)’s garden was blooming with activity as students planted pollinator-attracting perennials, filled beds with soil, weeded, added trellis lines to tomato plants, turned the compost, and painted. Abby (13), Ashley (12), and Ariana (11) led me around their garden, expertly identifying their crops and generously offering me tastes along the way. Constructed by students practicing their engineering skills, the raised beds were lined with plastic and chicken wire to dissuade animals from burrowing inside. As we moved on, some unique and colorful structures caught my eye. The garden has two rainwater barrels painted as a chicken and a pig, and a large brightly-painted wooden shed. The front is painted with chalkboard paint where students list their garden to-dos and create temporary works of art. Ashley pointed out the different tools and supplies in the shed, but was particularly proud of the supply of extra work boots in case a student isn’t wearing proper footwear. Abby was also proud to point out the garden’s six compost bins and their contents. Abby’s dad built the garden’s most recent addition: the compost tumbler. Made out of salvaged materials, it includes engineering that will enable them to harvest natural gas from the compost! Using student recipes and ideas, they plan to use the gas for cooking in the garden, an activity that the students enthusiastically lead from prep to feast. What were these students doing in the garden during their summer vacation? Ariana expressed that she likes to plant and “growing different types of plants and vegetables is cool.” Ashley loves the garden, it is “a place for me and my friends to gather while helping the environment and still have fun.” Abby agreed and added that being in the garden “is a chance to get away from the city.” Behind the students’ love for the garden is a dedicated and inspirational teacher, Meredith Hill. Meredith’s goal is to make the garden as student-driven as possible. During the month of June, students participate in an elective course focusing on one topic. Abby and Ashley joined Meredith and 30 other classmates in the garden for a Food and Sustainability course where they learned garden care, compost, raised bed construction, and how to prepare meals using produce from the garden, choosing what to plant and cook. The course culminated in the publication of Fresh!, a student-authored anthology created entirely by the 7th grade Food and Sustainability Class and features some of our favorite GreenThumb school gardeners. Students teach skills that they learn to fellow gardeners and the rest of the school community. From Garden to Café harvest events incorporating garden produce into the menu to collecting food waste for composting, the school gardeners have a big presence during lunch at CSS-MSE. Following a student suggestion, the School Food Director allowed students to harvest, prepare and add fresh veggies to pizza as well as distribute samples of garden produce from tomatoes to kale chips. To keep the students’ interest and excitement—and the garden—maintained, Meredith introduced open garden hours during the summer. Students were able to choose their level of involvement with the garden and it provides a chance for students who were not in her class to dig in and help. CSS-MSE’s gardening successes didn’t come without challenges. After two years of having a rooftop garden, new regulations made them unable to use the space. Meredith explained, “I started looking for spaces elsewhere to garden, and a colleague suggested that I check out this space. The site was indeed overgrown and abandoned. Once we discovered it was a Parks Department property, I contacted GreenThumb and we started the process of registering it as a garden. Crucial to this process was finding interested parents and colleagues who helped make connections and offer support to the garden. We received keys about a year later, in the spring of 2010.” Meredith and her students are so grateful for all the support they have received from GreenThumb and Grow to Learn as they have built and improved their garden. Now that the school year has begun, they will transition some of their beds into colder-weather crops, and hope to extend the growing season, thanks to new row-covers from a recent GreenThumb workshop! They plan to hold leaf raking parties in Morningside Park to stow away lots of brown material for their year of cafeteria compost. Meredith will incorporate the garden into her English class this year as a way to demonstrate how gardening supports the Common Core standards. Students are also enthusiastically planning a GreenThumb composting workshop for this October that will be led by 7th and 8th grade students. Keep a lookout in our October newsletter for the exact date, time, and location.

Hats Off to Women in Agriculture at the Fifth Annual Taste of Greenmarket

July 18, 2012

On June 27, at our annual benefit, Taste of Greenmarket, we honored Women in Agriculture for their contributions to the Greenmarket community and the sustainable agriculture community at large. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, chef Mary Cleaver of the Green Table, and Diane Eggert, director and founder of the Farmers Market Federation of New York, as well as GrowNYC Executive Director Marcel Van Ooyen, Chairman of the Board Bob Kafin and Greenmarket Director Michael Hurwitz, addressed our 80 women farmer honorees, thanking them for their work in the field and the example they set for the next generation of agricultural producers. The room buzzed with Greenmarket farmers, steadfast supporters, and over two dozen chefs and mixologists from around the city who build their menus around the seasonal availability of local products in the market. A dizzying array of dishes featured Grazin’ Angus Acres short ribs, tri-star strawberries from Berried Treasures, Bobolink Dairy cheese, and many other products grown right here in our region by Greenmarket farmers. Many thanks to the guests, honorees, producers, chefs, mixologists, donors and sponsors who made the fifth annual Taste of Greenmarket a screaming success! All proceeds will benefit Greenmarket's Youth Education Project, which provides school tours of markets, meet your farmer classroom visits, and implementation of our Seed to Plate curriculum. Photo booth photos: Event photos:

NYC Teens take "Fast Food IQ Test"

In preparation for the 2012 Youthmarket season, GrowNYC brought together more than 50 young people from across the city to learn about food, agriculture, and the basics of running a farm stand. Incoming youth-staff read nutrition labels and took a  “Fast Food IQ Test” with David Saphire from our Learn It, Grow It, Eat It program and discussed inventory planning, outreach strategies, and small business math with experienced Youthmarket Managers. Youth also sampled the best of the season during a produce tasting that familiarized them with the products they’ll be selling, and they ended the day with a tour of the Union Square Greenmarket, where they chatted with farmers, saw different ways of creating attractive product displays, and learned the secret to keeping vegetables looking fresh on hot summer days. GrowNYC’s 11 Youthmarkets all open this week for the 2012 season, and all of them feature fresh produce grown by Greenmarket farmers. Teens identified by our community partner organizations learn valuable job skills and earn their own money while providing their friends, family, and neighbors with access to fresh, healthy, local foods. Visit our website to find a Youthmarket near you!

Attention NYC public schools: Apply for GrowNYC’s Recycling Champions Program for the 2012-2013 school year

May 29, 2012

Is Your School a Recycling Champion?

Update! We've extended the deadline to June 22nd at 5pm. GrowNYC is now accepting applications for the 2012-2013 Recycling Champions Program from NYC public schools! Recycling Champions is a free program available to K-12 schools in all five boroughs that helps to launch model, school-wide recycling programs. It's conducted in partnership with the NYC Department of Education Division of School Facilities and Office of Sustainability, and the NYC Department of Sanitation.Recycling Champions aims to empower schools to comply with, and exceed, NYC's recycling laws, and in the process students create school wide projects and campaigns, and learn environmental leadership skills that place their schools on the forefront of NYC's Mayoral directive to double the City's diversion rate by 2017. Your school can receive a dedicated coordinator to help organize school recycling and events, galvanize staff, and educate students through hands-on lessons and activities. The application deadline is June 22! Download the application as a PDF file or as a Word DOC. See you at School!

Grow to Learn NYC turns 1 and registers its 200th School

February 16, 2012
Posted in Community Gardens | Tagged grow to learn

We're proud to report that Grow to Learn NYC: the Citywide School Gardens Initiative has just celebrated its first anniversary. A public/private partnership between GrowNYC, the Mayor’s Office to Advance New York City, and GreenThumb, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, Grow to Learn was created to inspire, create and maintain gardens in every public school in New York City. Offering mini-grants, free materials and technical expertise to registered gardens, Grow to Learn helps school gardeners create gardens that can be utilized as outdoor classrooms and indoor living labs.

We're also proud that we've just registered our 200th school garden. From the southern tip of Manhattan to the northern reaches of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, school gardens of all shapes and sizes are flourishing. Teachers are able to utilize the gardens to help students apply what they have learned in the classroom to everything from science and math to foreign languages, nutrition, health and even music. After-school programs in urban planning, environmental studies and urban farming are able to utilize the gardens as teaching tools, and summertime gardening programs are able to continue to harvest fresh vegetables through the peak growing season. Students report that they feel more enthusiastic about learning when they can see how it applies in "the real world," teachers report that the students feel a deep sense of personal responsibility and pride that their school has a garden and an overall greater interest in subjects where the garden is utilized. We are also told that having a school garden creates a sense of community within the school and also with the community at large as neighbors stop by to find out what the kids are doing in the garden.

Don’t see your school garden on the list or want to start one at your school? Visit Grow to Learn to read all about the benefits of registration at our website www.growtolearn.org, view Success Stories for some inspiration about what a school garden can look like, or get Step-by-Step help to learn how to start a garden at a school of your own. You can also find us on Facebook!

Starting a school garden is an incredibly rewarding endeavor; get started now and perhaps yours can be garden #201!

Support Teen Farmers - Get a Calendar!

January 26, 2012

Order your beautiful, colorful and informative 2012 Endangered Species calendar, designed by high school students from the South Bronx today.

10 talented Morrisania-based teens and Learn it, Grow It, Eat It program interns designed a calendar featuring endangered species. As part of our year-round program, 200 teens get outside for hands-on gardening, learn about healthy eating and make the connection between health, nutrition and environment.

You will receive a calendar for your donation of $25 dollars. Make sure you designate "Environmental Education" and type "2012 Calendar" in the Dedication box when you make your gift and we’ll send you a calendar.

Donate here and receive your calendar!

Free solar oven curriculum for teachers

January 24, 2012

Looking for a fun activity for kids, ages 8-17 in the classroom or at home? Want to reinforce key concepts in the Earth Science syllabus?

Our Environmental Education program is happy to provide "Solar Ovens and Earth Science," a hands-on curriculum unit free of charge. Email mzamm@grownyc.org and provide your mailing address to get your copy.

Support School Recycling Champions on Kickstarter

November 7, 2011

GrowNYC is trying something new. Kickstarter, the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world, invited us to launch a project.

We're trying to raise $10,000 in 60 days to bring our Recycling Champions program to one school in each borough in 2011-12. We'll work alongside students, teachers, administrators and custodial engineers to educate the school community about the importance of recycling, provide professional development resources and presentation tools, facilitate classroom activities and lessons, and create youth recycling "ambassadors" to motivate and educate community. Make your pledge TODAY and get fun rewards!

Vote for GrowNYC's School Recycling Champions on Kickstarter!

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