About the SORT2SAVE KIT
Licensing - Partners - Funders!

Back to the SORT2SAVE KIT - Cafeteria Ranger Program - Steps 1-8 here

The Cafeteria Culture team has been piloting the Cafeteria Ranger Program in NYC Department of Education Schools since 2011. We have led the program in over fifteen K-12 schools, servicing over 5,000 students from Manhattan and Brooklyn communities.

Atsuko Quirk, CafCu Media Director and Cafeteria Ranger Program Director, piloted the first version of the Cafeteria Ranger Program at the Earth School. One day, she walked into her children's cafeteria and thought it was "a special day" because there was no sorting and nobody seemed to care about the amounts of garbage. Atsuko asked the principal if she could try out a program with students taking on leadership roles to help with recycling and composting, as students do back in Atsuko's home country of Japan.

In 2012, Atsuko and Debby Lee Cohen, CafCu Executive Director and Founder, decided to pilot the first ARTS+ACTION Cafeteria Waste Reduction Program, merging the hands-on Cafeteria Ranger program with interdisciplinary classroom learning and advocacy. Since that time, we have led the program primarily in low-income communities of color. We realized that for the program to be a success, we needed to seek out the challenges and find solutions.

Our dream has always been to share this program
WITH ALL SCHOOLS FOR FREE! 

We are extremely grateful to all of our school partners and funders, who worked with us over the last 5 years, sharing ideas, providing valuable feedback, and allowing us to make mistakes and to try again! These schools have been our partners in innovating operations, curriculum and solutions for a zero waste, healthy future for generations to come.

Cafeteria Culture is a very small not-for-profit environmental education and advocacy organization. We are a regular staff of 3, who volunteer over 30 % of our time and work in a virtual office. We are very grateful for the other members of our CafCu Team: interns, volunteers, and assistants,  who have helped us to lead and develop the SORT2SAVE KIT.
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WHY?

Schools need the SORT2SAVE KIT and zero waste curriculum now!
In New York City:

• NYC recently expanded the school Organics Collection (composting) to include 700 or about40% of all NYC public schools. 
• The latest City Diversion Report states that school compost bins are “often heavily contaminated.”1
• As if September, 2015, 1/2 a billion compostable school food plates replaced styrofoam trays in schools in the 6 largest US school districts.  Cafeteria Culture is dedicated to ensuring that this new School Food "green" packaging remains a resource.

In other school districts across the US:

• Our garbage, including methane producing food waste and organic materials, contributes to climate change. This in turn causes more extreme weather, like Hurricane Sandy and dangerously hot summer days, thus increasing global food insecurity and compounding many other environmental problems.
• The entire cycle of 
• Plastic marine pollution is a global plight. It is critical that students learn the importance of reducing and recycling the use of plastics and keeping these materials made from fossil fuels as a resource.  
• If your school is still using styrofoam, please learn more about how you can begin to eliminate these trays from your cafeteria. The chemical styrene, a major component of polystyrene trays and food containers, has been categorized as a “reasonably anticipated to be carcinogen" by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Styrene is toxic and polluting from the start of manufacturing and forever thereafter.

• By reducing the amount of garbage that we throw away at school, home, and everywhere else, we conserve natural resources and help our community and the world.

THE CHALLENGES

• It is particularly difficult for principals to allocate limited staff time towards initiating new cafeteria procedure. 
• Lunch periods are short, often only 20 minutes, with little time for sorting at the end.

In NYC, our Throw Away Culture costs NYC taxpayers over $330 million per year! 
We export garbage in gas sucking, carbon spewing trucks, that crisscross the city, first to waste transfer stations located primarily in low-income minority neighborhoods, then to out of state landfills and incinerators.  The entire journey contributes to climate change, negatively impacting communities al along the way.

1-Diversion Report II, NYC Organics Collection Pilot, April - September 2014." NYC Department of Sanitation. Web. 22 July 2015.

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Cafeteria Culture's
​SORT2SAVE KIT
​Copyright License Agreement 

The SORT2SAVE KIT and the SORT2SAVE lyrics by Debby Lee Cohen are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at [email protected].

Our Funders

A VERY SPECIAL THANK YOU to our wonderful funders of the SORT2SAVE KIT and the Cafeteria Ranger Program:

• Underwriters Laboratories Innovation Education Award - made possible by UL and North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE)
• The Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation -

      founded by Kim and Jack Johnson to support        environmental, art, and music education

• New York City Council, Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, District 2
• The US Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2
• NYC Green Festival Community Award 2015
• Fund for the City of New York
• Our ​Individual Donors!​

Our Partners

THANK YOU to the FABULOUS students, teachers administrators, custodians, kitchen staff, school aides, PTA's and parents at the following New York City Department of Education Schools:

• PS 34 M Franklin D Roosevelt (D1)
• NEST+M - New Explorations in Science and              Technology + Math (D1)
• PS 221 K - Toussaint L'Ouverture (D17)
• The Earth School (D1)
• MS 246 K Walt Whitman Middle School (D17)
• PS 20 M Anna Silver (D1)
• PS 29 K John M. Harrigan School (D15)
• PS 15 K Patrick F, Daley School (D15)
• PS 167 K The Parkway School (D17)

These partner schools helped us with the creation of the  SORT2SAVE KIT videos and so much more.

 We gratefully acknowledge the support of many other school communities, including PS 7 M Samuel Stern, Global Technical Prep, Tompkins Square Middle School, PS 110 M Florence Nightingale,The Neighborhood School, PS 63 The Star Academy, Hunter College Elementary School, and many more.

Thank you to Nessa Arnold from PS 33 X Timothy Dwight School for testing out the SORT2SAVE KIT
and providing feedback and encouragement!

THANK YOU to our Government Partners:

• New York City Department of Education Office of School Food 
• New York City Department of Education Schools Office of Sustainability
• The US Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2

Additional thanks to:
Cafeteria Culture volunteers!
NYC Department of Sanitation
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer NYC Department of Education Schools Office of Media The Urban School Food Alliance 
​Juice Generation and 1% for the Planet
​NYU Community Fund
Teachers College, Columbia University
Syracuse University, Environmental Finance Center  
Borax Paper and Products, Inc. 
NEST+m PTA
PS 20 M Anna Silver PTA
PS 110 M Florence Nightingale PTA
Wellness in the Schools
Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board