Watershed moment gives rise to a revitalized riverfront

 

The Rotary Club of Milwaukee transformed its city’s riverfront with a contribution from a local landowner — a strategy that could work in other communities

By Diana Schoberg Photography by Jeff Marini

The Rotary Club of Milwaukee worked to revitalize its city’s riverfront that had once been the heart of the city but had turned into an unkempt wilderness.

They are scenes from another time, and seemingly another place. Beneath the hot summer sun, hours after they’d spent their morning mastering the breast stroke and the crawl, kids enjoy a carefree afternoon cavorting in a reservoir formed by the dam downstream. On other occasions, weekend mariners ply those same waters in canoes and rowboats, or more serious athletes, representatives of the rowing clubs that line the river’s steep bluffs, compete in vigorous regattas. Daring merrymakers ascend the bluffs, pile into a large wooden craft, and swoosh down a waterslide, landing in the river with a gigantic splash. Flip the calendar ahead six months and cheering throngs, numbering as many as 20,000 people, marvel at the acrobatic antics of ski jumpers as they race at 80 miles per hour down those same bluffs. And where avid anglers in balmier months fished for pike and bass, skaters of all ages, bundled up against the winter cold, glide across the icebound river.

These may seem like faded snapshots from America’s pastoral past. As noted in Eddee Daniel’s The Milwaukee River Greenway, they are actually glimpses of the Milwaukee River at the turn of the 20th century as it coursed through what was then the 14th-largest city in the United States. The river had been the heart of Milwaukee from the times when Indigenous people traveled there to harvest wild rice, hunt waterfowl, and catch fish. Settlers of European descent dammed the river in 1835 to provide water to the mills and factories that sprang up along its banks, and in winter “Brew City” breweries harvested ice from the river reservoir to cool the beer that patrons quaffed in summer at the beer gardens along the river’s shores. The celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside Park, one of the many parks along the river, in the 1890s; it was home to, among other things, a pavilion and a curling rink. About a mile upstream was an amusement park that The Milwaukee Journal called a “brilliantly lighted wonder city.”

But even as children played and couples courted, trouble lurked beneath the water’s surface — or sometimes right on top of it. Filled with sewage runoff, the river had become Milwaukee’s de facto toilet. The situation was so bad that, in 1888, the city began “flushing” the river daily with water from Lake Michigan, using what was said to be the world’s largest pump. Even as the city invested in its nationally recognized sewer system, heavy rainfall frequently caused overflows, sending wastewater into the river. At the same time, as the shoreline factories thrived, the loads of toxic industrial waste destined for the river increased exponentially.

Inevitably, that idyllic waterfront playground disappeared, replaced by an unkempt wilderness. Drug trafficking and other crime became the new pastimes for visitors to neglected Riverside Park. “When we were kids, we’d go there,” recalls Matt Haas, a member of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee. “It was this scary place to go on your bikes. All the trails were abandoned, and the ornate old streetlights didn’t work anymore. We thought it was haunted.”

But just as the wonderland vanished, so too did the blighted wasteland. Visit Riverside Park today and you will encounter a place magically transformed, all thanks to some dedicated Rotary members, their committed and farsighted partners, and an ingenious focus on conservation, land trusts, and generous eco-minded citizens — a miracle formula that, with a few site-specific tweaks, can be applied anywhere.

This massive stone archway was designed by Mario Costantini, a member of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee.

A river revitalization

It’s a sunny morning in May and, serenaded by the sound of chirping birds, members of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee swarm the riverside Coyote Hill. Beneath a cornflower blue sky, kids playfully bang trowels against rocks as their parents pull augers and gloves and drills from crates situated along a winding path that passes beneath a massive stone archway.

Caitlin Reinartz, the urban forester at Milwaukee’s Urban Ecology Center, wears a straw hat and leans on a shovel as she reviews the day’s tasks. Rotary members are here to plant more than 1,000 prairie grass seedlings, varieties like little and big bluestem, prairie dropseed, and switchgrass. Reinartz demonstrates the proper planting technique with a Virginia wildrye seedling. “This year it won’t grow much more than knee height,” she says in her booming voice. “Next year, after it overcomes its transplant shock, this baby is going to be 9 feet tall.”

The crowd oohs.

Reinartz explains the benefits of prairie grasses — how they provide habitat for birds and bees, sequester carbon, and remove pollutants from the air. “We are really making a good change here today, one that’s going to last a lot longer than we will. This is going to be around for maybe 110 years,” she jokes, a nod to the club’s 110th anniversary. The crowd oohs again and gets to work.

The land where Rotary members are planting was once the site of the National Brake and Electric Co., which, after its incorporation in 1906, rapidly grew to employ 1,400 people in its machine shop, foundries, and other facilities. During World War I, the company produced heavy equipment for the war effort, but the boom was short-lived: The site closed during the Depression due to financial issues. By 1939, like other locations along the river, the factory had been abandoned.

“Over the years, Milwaukee Rotary has planted thousands and thousands of trees,” says urban forester Caitlin Reinartz.

After a lapse of more than 30 years, things took a turn for the better with the 1972 passage of the Clean Water Act, which put the brakes on industrial pollution. In the 1980s and ’90s, the governor of Wisconsin created a task force to come up with a plan for the river, Milwaukee built new sewage tunnels to catch wastewater overflow during storms, and the dam came down. Concerned neighbors founded the Urban Ecology Center to decrease crime and bring life back to the Olmsted-designed Riverside Park.

In 1994, the Rotary Club of Milwaukee joined with the local Kiwanis club to create the River Revitalization Foundation, an urban land trust with a mission to protect and revitalize the river’s environmental corridor. The group also worked to make the land that had reemerged with the draining of the dam’s reservoir accessible to the public, and it lobbied to safeguard riparian habitats. To ensure that people could thoroughly enjoy this newfound nature, it helped implement zoning laws that restricted building heights in the “viewshed.”

The result is the 6-mile-long Milwaukee River Greenway, which, at 878 acres, is larger than New York City’s Central Park (another Olmsted-designed beauty). Today, from parts of the greenway, it can feel like you’re in a remote wilderness rather than in a river basin that’s home to 1.3 million people.

“In a lot of ways, it is an accident we have this,” says Matt Haas, who holds one of the Rotary seats on the River Revitalization Foundation’s board. “This whole river was a big toxic industrial waste dump. The fact that the dam came out and exposed all that land that had previously been under water, in combination with a bunch of these warehouse and manufacturing owners taking buildings down, basically freed up a bunch of green space that previously didn’t exist.”

Milwaukee Rotarian Karen Hung shows off the prairie grasses she is preparing to plant.

Energetic Rotary members plant grass seedlings on Coyote Hill, which rose on the site of a former foundry.

That was just one piece of the Milwaukee club’s transformation of the city’s environmental landscape. In 2007, as the club was casting around for a project to mark its centennial in 2013, the Urban Ecology Center brought forward a proposal to expand Riverside Park. It was another opportune moment: Pieter Godfrey, an architect interested in historic preservation and materials reclamation, owned property immediately south of the park — the former National Brake and Electric Co. site — and he had been in conversation with the Urban Ecology Center about donating 4 acres of that land.

Rotarians pledged to raise $400,000, the seed money for what ended up being an $8 million endeavor that resulted in a 40-acre arboretum encompassing Riverside Park. Godfrey died in 2011, but his family donated the $2 million parcel. Members of Rotary seeking additional funding for the project testified before the Wisconsin Legislature and helped land a $1.3 million grant from the state Department of Natural Resources. The federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative provided nearly $1 million, and many other public and private donations helped subsidize the now-flourishing urban paradise.

“It’s amazing we have this so close to the city,” says Mary McCormick, executive director of the Rotary Club of Milwaukee, as she looks out over the river and reflects on Rotary members’ role in the creation of the greenway and the arboretum. “We were the glue that held this together for five years. We were committed to getting this done.”

As she strolls along the riverside trails, McCormick stops periodically to chat with a birder, point out a canoe launch, and listen to a fly fisherman who’s been having some luck with smallmouth bass. Among the goldenrod and rudbeckia flowers rise the thousands of trees planted over the years by Rotarians: white birch and silver maples, American sycamore and white walnut, to name only a few. A huge, downed tree and strategically placed branches cry out to be climbed. The U.S. Forest Service, another partner in the project, has designated the arboretum as a national children’s forest, one of only 22 in the country, and one of only three in a major urban area.

Some of the newly planted and well-nurtured grasses will one day reach a height of 9 feet.

“You have to be an advocate for something,” McCormick says. “We advocate for having vaccinations, we advocate for clean water, and we advocate for taking care of the land. We have done that, and we should do that as Rotarians. We need to protect the resources we have, and in some cases bring them back.” And there are ingenious methods of doing exactly that, which Rotary and Rotaract clubs around the country may want to duplicate.

The value of land grants

As a former executive director of a land trust in northern Michigan, Kirt Manecke talked with landowners who were interested in preserving their property. “I’d ask them, ‘What is your reason for doing this?’ And they said, ‘Well, I just love our land,’” he recalls. Or, he continues, they didn’t want their kids to “slice and dice” their property for development when they died. The biggest problem Manecke, a member of the Rotary Club of Northville, Michigan, ran into was that people had no idea what options are available when it comes to land preservation.

Get involved

Rotary clubs and districts can financially support the preservation of land through Rotary Foundation global grants. Find out more about the Foundation’s focus on protecting the environment at rotary.org/environment.

Don’t re-create the wheel. Reach out to members of a local land trust to learn how to work with them. Rotary members can sit on land trust boards, and Rotary volunteers can participate in service days to care for lands. Land trust board members can make good speakers at club meetings to educate Rotary members on options for their own or family members’ lands.

Laws around land ownership vary by country. Find a U.S.-based land trust at landtrustalliance.org/land-trusts, and resources for other countries are available through the International Land Conservation Network at landconservationnetwork.org.

More than half of all real-estate wealth in the U.S. — about $23.3 trillion — is held by people ages 60 and older, according to the Federal Reserve. “That is a lot of value,” says Andrew Bowman, president and CEO of the Land Trust Alliance, a national land conservation organization that represents nearly 1,000 land trusts in the United States. “There could be a number of people in those generations that want to preserve their land or keep their land in the state it is now, whether that’s for scenic beauty, a working farm, or a wildlife habitat. There’s a lot of different reasons people might preserve land, and these generations might do something to make sure their land stays that way.”

That’s where land trusts come in — and where Rotary clubs could too. These trusts, nonprofit organizations that partner with private landowners to permanently conserve their land, held more than 61 million acres in the United States at the end of 2020. That’s more land than is found in all of the country’s federally regulated national parks.

Land trusts might run on a national or international level, such as with the Nature Conservancy, or as community institutions, like Milwaukee’s River Revitalization Foundation. “It’s a natural synergy,” says Bowman, who was a Rotary Scholar at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom in 1989-90. “Chances are there is an organization ready-made for Rotary members to work with.”

Rotary Foundation global grants weren’t available for the Milwaukee arboretum. But with the adoption of the environment as one of Rotary’s areas of focus, land preservation projects are now eligible for Foundation funding. “It checks all the boxes for Rotary,” Manecke says. “It’s important for kids. It’s important for the mind. It’s important for clean drinking water.” And, adds Bowman, it’s a “natural climate solution. Whatever your motivation is, there are all these side benefits.”

Protecting the ecosystems

Paige Radke scrapes her shovel across the soil, pulls a little bluestem seedling out of its pot, and plants it in Coyote Hill. A past president of the Rotaract Club of Milwaukee and now a member of the Milwaukee Rotary club, Radke was drawn to Rotary because she enjoys volunteering, and her passion is the environment. When a seat on the River Revitalization Foundation board opened up, club executive director McCormick asked her to take it.

With her passion for the environment, Milwaukee club member Paige Radke welcomes the opportunity to preserve and enhance an urban green space.

“We feel good about what we’re doing,” says Radke, taking in views from the hill. “This could have been built into condos with riverfront views. It’s important to the ecosystem, and it’s maintaining that ability for the public to access the green spaces in urban environments.”

Construction on the arboretum began in 2010 and included capping off the contaminated soil of the former factory to create the hill Rotary members are planting this day. The arboretum, which opened in 2013, is owned by Milwaukee County and managed by the Urban Ecology Center. Rotary members continued to be involved, and today, in part because of their efforts and the work of more than 2,000 volunteers, the arboretum is home to tens of thousands of new plants, including trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers, and a dozen distinct ecosystems. That includes a re-created oak savanna, once common to the area.

After finishing up their planting project on Coyote Hill, about 60 people gather around Reinartz. “People deserve to live in a city that is beautiful, that is green, that is healthy, that is safe,” says the urban forester. “That was missing before Rotary planted this piece of land. With friends like you, I think the future of this spot is really bright and beautiful.”

A monarch butterfly floats behind Reinartz, and the prairie grasses wave in the breeze, as if to whisper, This is our place — and this is our time.

This story originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.

Visit :-

https://www.rotary.org/en/watershed-moment-gives-rise-revitalized-riverfront

The real reasons we still trash so much food and what it will take to change

 

The real reasons we still trash so much food and what it will take to change

By Carolyn Beans

It happens every year. Apple cider appears at the grocery store and I immediately start planning. My family will carve pumpkins and host outdoor movie nights and sit by firepits. For all these activities, we’ll need warm apple cider, and lots of it. I buy a gallon. On my next trip, I buy another. I can’t be caught short during cider season. But inevitably, we tire of apple cider, and the remainder turns vinegary in the back of the refrigerator before I pour it down the drain.

No one feels good about wasted food. But once tossed, it’s all too easy to forget. All the while, rejected food piles up in landfills. In the U.S., nearly a quarter of the solid waste inside those huge mounds is food, mingled with discarded furniture, packaging, electronics, and clothing. As it rots, food releases methane, the supervillain of greenhouse gases that, while shorter-lived than carbon dioxide, is far better at trapping heat during its 10 or so years in the atmosphere. That’s why reducing food waste throughout the supply-to-consumption chain is recognized by nonprofit Project Drawdown as one of the single most effective ways we could slow our planet’s heating.

Food photography by Jeff Marini; Food styling by Mollie Hayward

For Rotary members and others who work to rescue food before it ends up in the trash can or down the drain, other motivators are cost savings and the desire to waste less when so many people go without enough to eat. That drive has taken on new urgency in recent years with inflation ballooning grocery bills in much of the world, to the point that some people can’t afford enough nutritious necessities. Reducing food waste is one concrete action we can take as individuals at home to contribute to solutions for this unwieldy world problem. Then, collectively, Rotary members and others band together to recover uneaten food at club meetings, in schools and other community institutions, and beyond to multiply the results.

The potential impact is huge: A third of food that’s sold in the U.S. goes to waste, and about half of all wasted food comes from our homes, with the rest from restaurants, factories, farms, and other sources. For years, I’ve been on my own mission to reduce my family’s food waste. I’ve made real progress — I don’t remember the last time I threw away an overripe banana. And yet, I still make missteps that leave me staring into the garbage bin and thinking, “How did I do this again?”

In search of answers, I asked food waste experts and Rotary members who lead on this issue for their take on the real reasons so many of us still throw away food — and what it will take to break the habit. “The food waste issue is so glaring in this country,” says Joe Richardson, a member of the Rotary Club of Southern Frederick County (Urbana), Maryland. “It’s no longer OK not to act.”

Understand the costs

To rescue more food, it helps to understand the cascade of negative effects from tossed leftovers and unused groceries. Decaying food produces nearly 60 percent of the methane released by U.S. landfills. Food and drinks sent down the drain generate methane as they decompose in sewers on the way to treatment plants. Ultimately, this waste may end up in landfills too, depending on communities’ wastewater processing.

Growing food that is never eaten uses up significant cropland and fresh water. Then there’s the cost to consumers. The average American family of four forks over $1,500 every year for food they never eat, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

But it’s hard to connect how wasting food in small ways — a fuzzy strawberry here, a stale bread slice there — adds up to sizable dollar losses and environmental costs. Perhaps technology will one day show us convincing evidence of the food we waste. Some Hilton hotels, for example, switched to smaller croissants after they installed camera devices at trash bins and used artificial intelligence technology to identify the contents. They detected many uneaten pastries. For now, when statistics don’t move us to address waste at home, other approaches might, from kitchen hacks to watching out for the psychological triggers that can set off wasteful behaviors.

• 100
  gigatons

  Reduction to CO2-equivalent emissions in the next 25 years if global food waste and losses are cut by 25%

Rotary Peace Fellow Elaine Pratley, who founded the organization Peace Kitchen in Melbourne, Australia, to promote understanding through conversations over shared meals, views food waste as a social justice issue. “We actually have enough food to feed everyone in the world,” she says. “The fact that there are people going hungry suggests to me that either there are global systems in place that prevent everyone from being fed, or there are attitudes towards how we consume and purchase or produce food that enable famines and hunger.”

Statistics from recent years show the gulf between waste and need: About 18 million U.S. households are food insecure for some portion of the year, meaning they don’t have enough food or aren’t sure they can purchase enough. Globally, 1 in 11 people go hungry. Yet the equivalent of over 1 billion meals go uneaten every day.

To begin changing our food waste behavior, Pratley suggests vegetable gardening. When her first garden was suddenly ripe before a trip, she couldn’t stand to have her hard-won broccoli rot while she traveled. She brought it along. “You suddenly realize the value because you’ve put in the effort and realize it’s not easy to grow vegetables that are not half-eaten or wilted away.”

Gardening may also make us more willing to overlook minor blemishes. “Blood, sweat, and toil went into growing this piece of fruit that we somehow reject,” Pratley says. “Someone else who’s hungry would gladly eat that.”

Resist this mind trick

Consider this disconnect: Most adults in the U.S. — about 85 percent of households — believe that Americans should make a greater effort to reduce food waste at home, a 2023 Mitre-Gallup survey found. Yet the rate at which we pour food into landfills continues to increase.

One suggestion is to recognize and resist psychological signals that drive us to buy more food than we need. “Those decisions you’re making around purchasing are being influenced by the environment and your current mindset a lot,” says Bonnie Simpson, a consumer behavior expert at Western University in London, Ontario.

• 2.3
  billion

  People worldwide who are food insecure

Her research suggests that environmental cues cause us to shift into a scarcity mindset, the perception that resources are limited so we better snap them up. We can fall into this thinking even when we have access to food. It’s a recipe for food waste.

A grocery store sign suggesting that an item is available only in limited quantities, for example, can plunge shoppers into a scarcity mindset, Simpson explains. So can knowing that an item is only around seasonally. (Now I know what drives my compulsive cider purchasing.)

To be clear, actual scarcity does not cause food waste. People experiencing food insecurity waste far less than wealthy consumers. But for those who have reliable food access, it’s important to be on the lookout for that scarcity mindset taking hold, Simpson says. “That awareness is really the best counter.”

Interrogate those food labels

Sometimes we throw away food because we mistakenly believe it’s unsafe. I was once a loyal subscriber to the “when in doubt, throw it out” philosophy for food past its “best by” label. Did it make sense to jeopardize my family’s safety to save a box of Cheerios unearthed from the pantry’s depths?

I’ve learned that the date labels that so many of us think of as “expiration dates” typically have nothing to do with safety. The U.S. government does not regulate the dates on food, except for infant formula. In most cases, date labels simply suggest when foods will be freshest, like when a cracker will still deliver its maximum crunch. There are exceptions. Listeria bacteria can grow in deli meats and soft cheeses that linger too long, for example. If in doubt, a quick search on the USDA’s ask.usda.gov should clear things up. The search function returns all sorts of helpful tips on how long you can refrigerate and freeze foods.

You might be surprised by how long food can stay safe in your freezer: indefinitely! But that only means bacteria won’t grow below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius), the recommended temperature for your freezer. To avoid spoilage, food must be fresh when you buy it and still fresh when you freeze it in airtight packaging, and your freezer can’t inch above 0 degrees.

Frozen food doesn’t keep its quality forever. So use up items within experts’ suggested time frames, or you may bite into discolored or dried out food with a taste, smell, or texture that’s off.

Understanding date labels’ true meaning could put a major dent in uneaten food. Nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households often or always discard food past the label date, the Mitre-Gallup survey found. These households waste more than two times as much food as those that don’t heed the dates carefully.

There’s also much kitchen confusion over which food bits are edible. Anne-Marie Bonneau, author of The Zero-Waste Chef: Plant-Forward Recipes and Tips for a Sustainable Kitchen and Planet, is a fan of cauliflower leaves. “Some of them have really thick white ribs that taste just like the cauliflower,” she says. She roasts the ribs or whole leaves with the florets. Or she chops the leaves and makes kimchi.

Broccoli stalks are edible and delicious, says Margaret Li, co-author of Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. She peels the fibrous exterior and then cuts the stalk into thin coins to roast with the florets. We often remove healthy produce parts simply because we think we’re supposed to. Recipes regularly call for cilantro leaves, Li says. “But cilantro stems are really delicious.”

Find a little time to meal plan

While food waste is rampant, not all of us are equal contributors. “There’s a ton of variation in how much food households are wasting,” says Ted Jaenicke, an agricultural economist at Pennsylvania State University. His team modeled food waste for over 3,000 U.S. households. By combining data on food purchases with information on height, weight, age, and gender, the researchers estimated the calories of food people bought versus consumed. “The most wasteful households were wasting over 80 percent of their food,” he says. The least wasteful tossed about 9 percent.

Meal planning is one way to move lower on the food waste spectrum. Start by looking at what’s already in the house. “Let that determine what you are going to cook next rather than saying, What do we feel like eating for dinner tonight?” Bonneau says.

It’s easier to see what’s on hand if it’s front and center. Li uses an “eat-me-first box,” a section of her fridge dedicated to odds and ends that will perish soon. It’s a hack her sister and cookbook co-author, Irene Li, developed for the siblings’ dumpling business.

Can I still eat this? How long food items stay fresh.

On the counter

• Powdered baby formula: One month after opening (Don’t use after “use by” date.)
• Noodles (eggless): 2 years unopened
• Canned tuna (unopened): 3-5 years
• Tomatoes (after ripening): 7 days

In the fridge (40 degrees)

• Apples: 4-6 weeks (They go bad weeks earlier on the counter)
• Deli sliced meat: 3-5 days
• Eggs (3-5 weeks)

In the freezer (0 degrees)

• Frozen whole chicken: 1 year
• Bread: 3 months (when frozen)
• Frozen dinners: 3-4 months

For once-a-week shoppers, meal planning only saves food if you’re realistic about what you’ll cook and how long ingredients can sit. As much as I want mushrooms on my homemade pizza, I’ve learned the hard way that portabellas I purchase on Saturday nearly always turn slimy by pizza night on Friday. Produce is by far the most common surplus perishable, according to ReFed, a U.S. nonprofit that promotes alternative uses for uneaten food. Jaenicke’s research shows that people with healthier diets tend to waste more food, likely because they buy more fresh produce. But there’s no need to skip greens. A weekly meal plan can include fresh produce earlier in the week and frozen veggies later.

Still, even with careful planning, the fight against food waste can feel stacked against us. A recipe calls for a tablespoon of chopped parsley, for example, but the herb is sold by the bunch. And what is a single person going to do with a head of cauliflower? Smaller households waste more food, Jaenicke’s study found.

Research a few tricks to salvage surplus. Make a quick pickle of the cauliflower. Braise wilting greens. Li’s cookbook includes a collection of “hero recipes” that can absorb extras. One of her favorites is savory bread pudding made with slightly stale bread. “I will just put in whatever is hanging out at the back of the crisper drawer, including kale stems, broccoli stalks,” she says.

Many Americans understand that food waste is a problem but also feel tight on time, according to a 2022 survey of over 1,000 consumers by Ohio State University researchers. These “harried profligates,” as the study describes them, make up about a quarter of households but contribute almost 40 percent of household food waste. “They were conscious that food waste was a place where they could improve and they could probably save money,” says study author Brian Roe, an Ohio State agricultural economist. “They just weren’t able to really undertake actions that were consistent with some of the attitudes that they held.”

Save the school lunch

Of course home isn’t the only place we waste food. It happens wherever we sit down for meals, from restaurants to Rotary meetings — and schools.

The Lunch Out of Landfills initiative recruits young people to lead cafeteria food rescue programs and volunteer to help classmates redirect unopened milk and other edible food to refrigerators and sharing tables for students, who use up the vast majority of food that would have been discarded. They divert the remaining scraps to bins picked up by a commercial composter.

Rotarian Joe Richardson, who started the project to rescue edible food in school cafeterias, says recruiting high school volunteers who care about the environment will provide a stream of potential Rotary members.

Image credit: Jared Soares

Richardson, the Maryland Rotary member, started Lunch Out of Landfills in 2018 through his nonprofit, Mountainside Education and Enrichment. He finds student volunteers through Interact clubs and environmental clubs, increasing the number of young people volunteering for Rotary as a way to gain members in the future through a topic they care about: the environment. “My goal has always been to align Interact clubs with school green teams,” he says of his role as Interact chair for District 7620 in Washington, D.C., and central Maryland.

Early on, Richardson noticed that students wasted milk at an alarming clip. “About 25 percent of cafeteria waste is liquids in the form of half-drunk milks and untouched milks,” he says. “This is not unique to Maryland. It’s a nationwide travesty.”

Richardson asks schools to add refrigerators for leftovers and donated some to a few schools in 2022 in Montgomery County through his nonprofit and his company, which runs summer camps and before- and after-school programs. The next year, that county district bought refrigerators for 80 more schools. The World Wildlife Fund provided a grant to support expansion by a group of students, including Interactors, from different high schools, called the Coalition to Re-Imagine School Waste, which Richardson advises. Lincoln Elementary in neighboring Frederick County recovers 11,000 cartons of milk every year, he says.

Lunch Out of Landfills, with its easy-to-duplicate model for Rotary clubs, has become a top food waste prevention project for the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group. What started as a single composting program at Urbana High School, in the area of Richardson’s club, has expanded to dozens of schools in Maryland so far, supported by Rotary club funding. With the action group’s backing, Richardson has helped Rotary members experiment with programs at schools in Idaho and Hawaii, and he collaborates with a Rotarian who started a similar initiative in New Hampshire. The action group’s Food Waste Task Force dispatches advocates to encourage Rotary clubs to support Lunch Out of Landfills programs.

Richardson is working with the World Wildlife Fund to improve and share materials on how to replicate the idea. But lasting change requires new policies that make commercial composting and refrigerators for food sharing permanent fixtures rather than line items easily struck from budgets.

Richardson is in the thick of navigating bureaucracy to achieve change that sticks in his state. “Every year I’m back to square one,” he says. “Are we going to do this this year? Can we expand the program?”

Maryland high school student Alessia Cuba saves food from the trash and recyclables while volunteering with the Lunch Out of Landfills initiative backed by Rotary clubs.

Image credit: Jared Soares

A legion of Interactors and other students is taking a lead role in advocating alongside Rotary members. In 2022, Richardson and students from the Coalition to Re-Imagine School Waste lobbied for a state bill seeking to establish a grant program to start initiatives like Lunch Out of Landfills in Maryland schools that applied. To rally support, the group delivered 6,000 handwritten postcards from students to their state legislators. The bill passed but the program wasn’t funded. The next year, they led another campaign that helped secure $250,000. But the state’s process of awarding the money was so slow that the food waste programs didn’t begin until six months into the 2023-24 school year. With the late start, they had little results to show, and the state budget did not include additional funding for the current school year.

“We’re going back with a different bill that’s going to make sure that funding is being transformed into actual change,” says Alessia Cuba, an Urbana High School junior who volunteers with Lunch Out of Landfills and the student coalition. “We recently met with a delegate specifically on the wording that we were wishing to see.”

Cuba is committed to tackling food waste through legislative action. “Policy isn’t really an overnight change,” she says, “but rather taking smaller steps in the right direction.”

Nail the last resort: Composting

Like Richardson and Cuba, many activists fighting food waste are committed to composting. It’s an important last resort when your best intentions fail and you’re left with produce beyond resuscitation. My own composting practice has taken many forms, from weekly drop-offs at an urban farm to curbside pickup by my township. Several years ago, I moved to a house with a backyard composter, but I had never managed a compost pile. Slightly intimidated and busy, two years passed before I made time to learn.

Once I did, I realized how easy composting really is. Indoors, food scraps go under my sink in a small steel container with a lid fitted with a charcoal filter to trap odor. Every day or so, I dump the contents in my outdoor composter. There, the trick is to layer food waste and “brown” material like dried leaves and give the pile a turn every week or so with a pitchfork (in my case) or a spin for a rotating bin. I’ve experienced zero bad smells, fruit flies, or furry critters drawn to my backyard compost.

John Harder, a member of the Rotary Club of Hanalei Bay, Hawaii, helped establish collection sites for commercial food waste during his career in solid waste management, and at home he is an avid backyard composter.

Courtesy of John Harder

For at-home composters, it’s best to stick to vegetable-based foods and eggshells, says John Harder, known as the Dump Doctor, of the Rotary Club of Hanalei Bay, Hawaii. “Bones and meat products, they’ll draw flies, they’ll draw rodents, and they’ll slow the process down.”

Before he retired in 2008, Harder worked for nearly two decades in solid waste management, primarily for state and county departments in Hawaii. He launched the county of Kauai’s first recycling program and helped establish collection sites for commercial food waste and yard waste like leaves and trimmed branches. He also arranged for composting and recycling at Rotary events. At home, he’s an avid backyard composter. “I’m 81 and I still run my composting piles every day,” he says. “It’s enjoyable.”

When I began composting at home, I knew the goal was to turn unused food and scraps into a soil amendment. Yet the first time I opened the little composter door and saw rich earth pour out, I was amazed.

The solutions ranked

This list of ways to deal with wasted food has a clear winner: prevention. When society buys only the food that’s needed and uses it up, that is the most effective way to reduce the food that must be produced. The benefits of other methods to handle food waste are small compared with food production’s environmental effects. Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Prevent it!

Donate or upcycle it

Feed it to animals or leave it unharvested

Compost it or break it down with microbes (use resulting materials from anaerobic digestion)

Apply it to the land or break it down with microbes (trash resulting materials)

But don’t let positive vibes from composting food make you forget about all of the resources that went into growing it. “Composting does not prevent food from going to waste. Composting is a way of dealing with the waste,” says Bonneau, the cookbook author.

A growing number of states and cities have passed laws to keep food out of the trash, with many focused on supermarkets, restaurants, and other commercial waste generators. Mandates to repurpose organic waste for composting or fuel generation have had varying levels of success, and it remains unclear whether regulations and fines can fulfill their full potential to slow the flow of food into landfills. In California, for example, residents must sort food scraps and other organic waste into a separate container, under a 2022 requirement. But the rollout is behind in many communities, and some towns question how they can use all the resulting compost from kitchen and yard waste. Officials and expert observers already doubt that the state will meet its 2025 goal to sharply cut organic waste to landfills.

Required or not, composting does feel good. But preventing food waste in the first place should feel even better. When we reduce any amount of food waste from the kitchen, we push back against a global problem with far-reaching environmental and societal consequences — all from the comfort of our homes, simply by eating the perfectly good food we chose to spend our money on.

Carolyn Beans is a biologist turned science reporter covering food, agriculture, and health from her home base in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.

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https://www.rotary.org/en/waste-not