The “Compost Initiative” is a collaborative engineering project that aims to help reduce the harmful effects of food waste through composting. With over 30% of food supply wasted annually, food waste is the single largest category in landfills and is one of the largest contributors to methane, a detrimental greenhouse gas largely responsible for climate change and health threatening air pollution. With schools contributing to over 530,000 tons of this annual food waste, our design team decided to engineer a system to help reduce the total food waste and
methane emission from school cafeterias. We designed a composting machine that efficiently conserves large quantities of food waste in schools, allowing students to continue enjoying their meals without wasting food. The “Compost Initiative” project continues our mission to benefit the world from our “Farm to Table” project, where we collaborated with local restaurants to host a dinner service with ingredients we grew ourselves and then donated the money to charity. With
some public schools already agreeing to implement our composting system in their cafeterias, we plan to advance and expand our project throughout schools in New York to further mitigate the harmful effects of food waste.