The article follows students and teachers at an elementary school in Florida as they tackle food waste in their cafeteria and shows how WWF’s Food Waste Warriors program is helping schools across the U.S. reduce discarded food and its environmental impact. At Citrus Elementary School, a teacher uses fun, hands-on lessons to help kids understand why food waste matters for the planet and how their choices connect to ecosystems and climate change. WWF’s program gives schools tools like waste audits, lesson plans, composting systems, and share tables where unopened food can be given to other students instead of being thrown away. School audits showed that food made up about half of what was being thrown out, illustrating how big the problem is: an average student wastes almost 40 pounds of food per year in U.S. schools, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and resource loss. The article also highlights how simple strategies, such as offering only what students want to eat, composting leftovers, and using bulk dispensers instead of individual cartons, can cut down waste. With these efforts, pilot schools have already diverted hundreds of thousands of pounds of food from landfills and turned it into compost, showing that reducing food waste can benefit both the environment and school communities.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/magazine/spring-2026/waste-not/