Duo honored for tackling food waste in schools

Edgewood Yacht Club was buzzing with activity on the morning of Friday, May 9, for Clean Water Action’s 23rd annual Breakfast of Champions. The assembled crowd, including US Senator Jack Reed, US Rep. Seth Magaziner, RI Speaker Joseph Shekarchi, RI Attorney General Peter Neronha, and RI General Treasurer James Diossa, gathered to honor six Rhode Islanders for their environmental work.

Among the morning’s honorees were Jim Corwin and Warren Heyman of the RI School Recycling Project, recipients of this year’s Reuse and Recycling Award. They are Cranston residents.

Begun in 2001, when schools were only beginning to recycle, the initiative has brought school recycling rates from 20 percent to 68 percent. More recently, though, the organization’s focus has shifted to food waste. Schools, particularly elementary schools, waste a lot of food, and it all ends up in the Central Landfill in Johnston. Or did, anyway, until Corwin and Heyman launched their program a few years ago.

In 2019, the Attorney General’s office provided Corwin a grant to measure food waste in Rhode Island schools. Elementary school students, on average, throw out about 47 pounds of food in a year. To put it another way, a literal ton of food waste might be generated by just two classrooms over the course of one school year. This causes problems, including the eventual release of methane, a greenhouse gas that is a primary driver of climate change.

Corwin knew there had to be a way around this, and he decided to pilot a program in a handful of area schools. With a $40,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, he concepted a strategy to eliminate food waste out of the trash. Sensing resistance from custodians and teachers, Corwin brought in Heyman, a recently retired friend from the Edgewood neighborhood with decades of experience organizing for the hospitality workers’ union UNITE HERE.

“I said you’ll need to talk to custodians, and you’ll need to talk to the food service workers,” Corwin says. Heyman agreed. 

“I’m retired but now I’m working 60 hours a week,” Heyman says. “But it’s totally fun and extremely rewarding. I’ve met so many amazing teachers, custodians, food workers and principals.”

The food waste program now includes 52 schools in 16 districts across the state, from the Newport and Chariho districts up to Woonsocket and Burrillville. For now the program is most concentrated in elementary schools, where students are actually the most wasteful with their lunches, but the program is gradually expanding into middle schools and high schools.

Corwin, Heyman, and a group of about 18 volunteers around the state visit schools and train groups of students about how to properly dispose of unwanted lunch. In the cafeteria, these student rangers guide their classmates through a quick and efficient five-step process.

First, they remove food that is still edible—unpeeled bananas and orange, for instance. That food goes into refrigerators supplied by the School Recycling Project, with signs in English and Spanish telling students that the food is free to anyone who will eat it. Food insecurity is a real issue in many schools, and studies have shown that hungry students are more tired and less able to concentrate on lessons.

The second stop is a five-gallon bucket with a simple colander on top. Students empty their juice and milk containers, and the liquids are later poured down the drain.

Third is recycling. This includes juice boxes, milk cartons, and paper lunch bags.

By this point, all that’s left is solid food, maybe a bit of trash, and a disposable lunch tray if the school doesn’t have an operating dishwasher. Opened, uneaten food goes into a compost bin. So do the compostable trays, thanks to a new law banning styrofoam trays from schools. What’s left is lightweight and doesn’t take up much space. Plastic silverware can’t be recycled. Neither can plastic sandwich bags or chip wrappers.

There are about 2,000 trained student rangers–some schools call them different names but the idea is the same–rotating lunch shifts every few weeks. By Corwin and Heyman’s count, they have already diverted 260 tons of food waste from the landfill and redirected about 30 tons of healthy food from the landfill to hungry students.

Heyman looks to the future. “There are no more landfills in Connecticut,” he said. “They burn about 60 percent of their solid waste, and the rest they pay to haul to a landfill in Pennsylvania.” The Central Landfill in Johnston is expected to reach capacity in the next 15 years or so.

”The taxpayers will be paying to haul trash out of state,” he says. “And more money for trash disposal means less money for the schools.”

One more bonus of the program is that the composted food returns in the form of fertile soil. Schools like Nathan Bishop Middle School in Providence use the soil to plant garden beds and have even incorporated gardening into the special education curriculum.

Rhodes Elementary School in Cranston was one of the first to implement the program. In April it was launched at Hoxsie Elementary School in Warwick, and in Johnston it operates at Brown Avenue Elementary School. That school’s cafeteria switched to metal trays last year, a move so notable that the Washington Post wrote about it.

There are substantial benefits to diverting food waste out of the trash. First and foremost, less trash in the dumpsters means that schools save money by reducing trash pickup.  Less food in the dumpsters means fewer rodents and other hungry pests lurking. Less food waste in the landfill means a reduction in harmful methane as the food decomposes. And fewer bags in the landfill mean that the Johnston facility might extend its life a little longer.

“All they have to pay for now is compostable gloves, compostable liners for the bins, and the fee to haul the food waste somewhere,” Heyman says. “So there’s a lot of different savings happening.”

Corwin knew there would be resistance. “My wife is a teacher,” Corwin said. “So I know that they’re stretched very thin and focused on getting kids to test well. There’s no time for what they might see as extracurricular.”

Teachers have started taking an interest, though. Schools do monthly audits of how much is being thrown away and how much is being diverted. 

At Hoxsie Elementary School in Warwick, before the program was implemented the school was throwing away 105 pounds of trash—about 12 bags—every day. When food waste is taken out of the equation, they were throwing away 10 pounds of trash a day, only two bags.

This year, the program received a federal grant to expand into Pawtucket, but like many grant contracts, theirs was canceled abruptly by the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last month. Luckily, the Rhode Island Foundation and the Newport-based nonprofit 11th Hour Racing stepped in. Whether the project will keep growing remains unclear, but Corwin and Heyman are plugging ahead.

The United Nations hopes to see a food waste reduction of 45 percent by the year 2030. According to the UN Environment Program, food waste is the third most common man-made cause of methane after the energy and agriculture industries.

“There are 305 schools in Rhode Island,” Heyman speculates. “Can we get them all composting by 2030?”

Rhode Island Clean Water Action 2025 Environmental Champions Jim Corwin and Warren Heyman of the RI School Recycling Project along with fellow award winners, State Rep. Megan Cotter and Pawtucket City Councilman Clovis Gregor. They were joined by Emily Howe, executive director of Clean Water Action and Jed Thorp, Save the Bay’s director of advocacy. Submitted photo by the RI House of Representatives David R. Gerraughty Award for Lifetime Commitment to the Environment — Dr. Hans Scholl is active member of Climate Action RI’s Politics Team and the Yes to Wind Campaign as well as the PolComm Team of the Environment Council of Rhode Island. He maintains a public accounting of pending environmental legislation which helps organizers know how and when to influence the progress of bills in the Rhode Island General Assembly. Additionally, his work highlighting the dangers of artificial turf polluting underground water supplies, rivers, and Narragansett Bay is noteworthy.    Legislative Champion — Rep. Megan Cotter (Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond) in 2024 fought to secure the $12 million in the Green Bond for the preservation of green open spaces in Rhode Island. She also leads by example and is an avid bicyclist while knocking on doors in her community.       Reuse and Recycling Award — Warren Heyman and Jim Corwin partnered with schools to start the RI School Recycling Project, which reduces waste in cafeterias and empowers kids to be recycling, reuse, and composting leaders. The program sometimes works alongside Clean Water Action’s ReThink Disposable program.   Environmental Justice Leader — Pawtucket City Councilman Clovis Gregor led an inspiring campaign to save Morley Field in Pawtucket, drawing attention and media eyes to inequities in green space access.    Steadfast Advocacy Award — Barry Schiller was honored for his decades of passionate advocacy for mass transit and RIPTA.

Example of trash. Submitted photo by Warren Heyman

Example of trash. Submitted photo by Warren Heyman