This is what lunch waste of 800 kids can look like, after students learned to sort their waste into recycling, compost and trash.

4 lbs, in a quarter bag instead of the regular 80-100 lbs in 9 bags. A 97% reduction in waste.

Recently, 800 of Mount Vernon’s brightest at the Steam Academy high school learned about how personal choices and small changes can make a big difference. Learning where the garbage actually goes when we are casually throwing it “away” made them realize that we all have -quite literally- skin in the game.

Westchester’s garbage gets burnt in Peekskill, all 2500 tons of it, every day at quite nauseating expense to the tax payer.

And over and over, once garbage is actually sorted, we realize that a whopping 95-97% of that material is actually resource for other packaging if it had just been put into the correct bin, instead of trashing it.

The Steam students, after just one week, are now automatically separating their waste and thus help to divert resources out of the waste stream into recycling.

Every school can do this, as a matter of fact, we as society have the moral and self preserving obligation to teach in our schools that together the most pressing problems can be reduced by 97% if we just taught and reinforced solutions.

Most solutions are actually quite simple, just a change of attitude and a different hand movement.