How teaching kids to compost will create long-lasting environmental action

One person's trash is another's treasure -- or a lifelong lesson on how to live sustainably -- as exemplified by students at a Georgia elementary school who have mastered the craft of composting while reducing their own food waste.

Lunchtime at the Lovin Elementary School, a STEAM school in Lawrenceville, Georgia, right outside of Atlanta, is a masterclass in how to properly dispose of food waste. Every day before lunch hour is over, a group of students, known as "Food Waste Warriors," collect leftover food that would otherwise be thrown away for a student-run composting project.

Equipped with red buckets, participants approach every table in the cafeteria, asking fellow students for their fruit and vegetable scraps, a fourth-grader named Reagan told ABC News.

Once the collections are complete, the students then bring the items to compost in the classroom of Gerin Hennebaul, the school's STEAM teacher who pioneered the program, where they weigh the leftover food.

There are layers of lessons to this exercise, Hennebaul told ABC News. Not only are the students learning about environmental health, they are practicing the math and analytical skills they’re learning in the classroom as well.

"They weigh it, they add the weights together," she said. "And they're learning about adding decimals."

Weighing the waste allows the students to track how well they are doing at reducing it, one of the overall goals of the program.

After the students log the day's collection, they put the scraps into a special composting bin that turns the organic waste into nutrient rich grounds.

Once the compost rests overnight, the students then add leaves to the mix and take it outside.

"We use a pitchfork and we turn them around," a fifth-grader named Chriselda told ABC News. "And once they've turned into compost, we use them for our STEAM garden to make our vegetables healthy."

Not all the scraps become compost. Some of the veggies are given to the chickens being raised on campus as well.

"It makes me feel super happy, because they're enjoying it and so am I," a fifth-grader named Jehle told ABC News.

On one fall school day, the students collected more than 18 pounds of food that would have otherwise gone to a landfill.

The U.S. generates about 80 million tons of food waste per year, Pete Pearson, global initiative lead for the food circularity program at the World Wildlife Fund, told ABC News. Much of the waste comes from leftover meals, Person said.

"Food carries a huge environmental burden," Pearson said. "When we waste food, we waste the energy, water and often wildlife habitat and nature that went into producing it."

Food waste accounts for about 24% of solid waste disposed of in landfills, according to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition, due to the fast rate at which food decays, an estimated 58% of methane emissions released to the atmosphere from municipal solid waste landfills are from food waste, according to the EPA.

Methane is one of the most concerning greenhouse gases, dubbed a "super pollutant" by the EPA. The greenhouse gas has a global warming potential about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Even with all this food waste, 15 million children still live in food insecure homes. So, the Lovin Elementary School Food Waste Warriors also collect unopened leftover food and place it on a "Share Table" and in a refrigerator that’s placed in the hallway. Students can grab a snack throughout the day if they get hungry again -- an effort to combat food insecurity within school walls.

The food is kept in a refrigerator and on a table in a hallway and is always accessible to students. The items usually gone by the end of the day are bottles of water, apple sauce, sliced apples, carrots and bananas, a fourth-grader named Olivia told ABC News.

"A lot of kids here don't have snacks here, and it's important for everyone to eat and stuff," Olivia said. "So we decided to make a shared table where everybody can share."

Eggs from the chicken coop and produce from the school garden are used to feed the students, staff and community.

"This school is an example for what I would love to see happening all across America," Pearson said.

Grants from the World Wildlife Fund are helping turn other cafeterias, like the one at Lovin, into an extension of the classroom for the conservation nonprofit's Food Waste Warrior program.

The passion the students gain for environmental action is passed on as well, Hennebaul said. Older kids show younger ones the ropes, and the students leave school excited to share with their families what they have learned, she said. Many of those families are now composting at home and working to reduce their own food waste.

"It makes me really proud that they are just doing these things on their own," she said.

This story is part of our Climate Ready series - a collaboration between ABC News and the ABC Owned Television Stations focused on providing practical solutions to help you and your family adapt to extreme weather events and the current challenges of climate change.