What does that forgotten container of take-out in the back of your refrigerator have to do with wildlife conservation? A lot, it turns out!

When food goes uneaten, all of the resources that are required to produce, process, package, transport, store, and prepare it are wasted as well. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, 80 million acres of wildlife habitat in the U.S. has been lost to farmland that produces food that is never eaten and wasted seafood results in the loss of about 2 billion pounds of marine life caught in U.S. fishing nets every year. 

Uneaten meat and dairy in the U.S. account for one-third of our total greenhouse gas emissions and more than three quarters of the habitat loss associated with food waste. And according to Project Drawdown’s global analysis of scalable solutions that we can take to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, reducing food waste is the #1 solution in the scenario that limits end-of-century warming to 2 degrees Celsius, which is critical for wildlife and human health. 

This spring, our Teen Leaders in Conservation program will include a virtual nine-week action research program through which teens will be invited to tackle this problem and investigate its impact on wildlife. A selected team of students will receive virtual training and support to complete a 4-week household food waste challenge while exploring the connections between food waste and wildlife conservation. 

We will be guided by our partners at Recycle Leaders to navigate the challenge and report data using their Thinkific course portal. After completing the challenge, students will create an action research project proposal of their own and will have the opportunity to present findings and recommendations to government decision-makers and academics in the food waste field.