Quick Take
Santa Cruz County high school students are tired of their schools generating copious amounts of food waste. That’s why Youth for Environmental Action, a student-led group under the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, has been conducting waste audits at local high schools. In one day this spring, students found more than 31 pounds of uneaten food in trash bins at three different schools – Aptos, Soquel and San Lorenzo Valley. Sylvi Kayser, a rising senior at Aptos High, helped conduct the audits and writes about what students will do with the information when school starts back in the fall.
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Each year, schools and universities in California produce nearly 562,442 tons of waste, a majority of which is either food or recyclable. As high school student leaders, we at Youth for Environmental Action (YEA) know we have the responsibility and the ability to combat this bleak statistic.
This is why our team is honing in on waste management.
We want to understand what systems are currently in place in our schools so we can alter them to make our schools as sustainable as possible. According to Santa Cruz County of Education self-reporting data, 53 schools (68%) say they have food waste collection or composting. But, when our team of teen leaders visited school sites, we saw some schools that claimed they were composting either were not doing it or were not doing it correctly. For instance, the schools might have a food waste container, but it is not accessible to students.
I have been a part of YEA’s leadership team for three years. I joined so I could see meaningful change happen in the county and at my school, Aptos High School, in particular.
The YEA program, under the Santa Cruz County Office of Education (COE), is part of the Youth Led Leadership Alliance (YLLA), which aims to increase student leadership opportunities. Our group began in 2019 and has grown countywide as the program continues. YEA gives students like me a platform to advocate for action, increase school sustainability, and integrate students and community members at the yearly Environmental Action Summit.
The goal for the 2024-25 school year was to change how we deal with waste streams, including trash, recycling and compost. We took on waste management since this was what students said they wanted to see change.
We polled students in all high schools in the county and got 1,067 student responses. In their answers, 60% of students said that their school was either not doing enough for environmental sustainability or that they were not sure what their school was doing.
Top student concerns were plastic pollution, climate change and solutions and ocean health.
We are using this information to take action.
We’ve highlighted these concerns to our administration through speeches to the board and our annual summit. High school voices matter, and through the survey, we are able to showcase our views, which all too often go unheard. Each year, we get more and more students participating in the survey and we want them to know that they can take action. We hope to use this survey data in tandem with our waste project this school year and beyond.
The survey also helped us see that a waste audit – a process used to measure the amount and types of waste produced – needed to be on the menu for our high schools. We conducted the first audits in spring at Aptos, Soquel and San Lorenzo Valley high schools. With this data, we’ve seen what waste systems are currently in place so that schools can implement a tri-system. This means having streams for trash, recycling and compost available and accessible to students.
After measuring waste from a single day at Aptos High, we found uneaten food made up 5.2 pounds of all waste in the trash cans. We found 6 pounds of food share – which is whole, unopened food that could be redistributed if it meets state guidelines – in just one quad of five on campus. Packaged fruit, unopened bags of chips or unopened milk cartons are some examples of food share. At Soquel High, we found 4.6 pounds of food share and a whopping 8.9 pounds of uneaten food in the trash cans in the main quad. San Lorenzo Valley High had roughly 3 pounds of food share and 4 pounds of uneaten food. All these numbers come from just one sample area after one full day.
It’s frightening to think about the waste generated per week.
YEA is promoting the implementation of compost into schools that do not have the system in place, in an effort to rethink and restructure cafeteria waste.
Our larger goal is to increase students’ awareness of how food waste produces greenhouse gases and how changing the packaging of foods – including single-use plastic – can reduce waste to combat climate change.
When school starts again, we plan to gather data across the county as part of our Trash Pact Project. We will look to see if schools have green waste bins and if they have placed them with trash and recycling bins and have a routine for emptying them. We will also see if schools have educational training for students on how to sort three-stream waste properly.
YEA, under the mentorship of Environmental Literacy Coordinator Amity Sandage, meets weekly over Zoom and once a month with county youth leadership groups.
YEA’s leadership team has six members from across Santa Cruz County this year. We’ve spoken on local radio stations, including KSQD, to discuss group achievements and impact including our survey results, and our summit. As a student group, we are actively working to get more students involved and demonstrate how young people can take action locally.
YEA is a force for change. I want to see our systems change while I’m still in high school. Restructuring waste management systems is such an effective means of reducing carbon footprint and there is a clear need for it right now. To anyone interested in joining, I highly recommend visiting the YEA website or our Instagram, which has the application form. As a group, we are full of determined students all working together to see change start at the local levels and move outwards.
Our own environment is up to us and the YEA team is stepping up.
Sylvi Kayser has just completed her junior year at Aptos High and wrote this piece to highlight YEA’s annual project. His work covering YEA has been featured in the Aptos Times and the Scotts Valley Times. In creative writing, their poetry will be published later this year in an anthology as part of the Youth Poet Laureate Coalition. This is her third year on YEA’s leadership team. Sylvi Kayser uses she/he/they pronouns. For more information on us as a team, visit our website, sccoe.link/yea.