Sophia Martin created a biodegradable takeout container to be implemented in schools across the country, starting at Western Reserve Academy.
Boarding schools, like mine,
feed the majority of the student population three times daily. At any given meal, I would estimate that 50 to 100 students take their food to-go. The to-go boxes Western Reserve Academy uses are not biodegradable, and are unfortunately very popular. Sophia Martin (WRA ’22) recognized this issue and did something about it.
Sophia’s project, To-Go Green,
is a biodegradable, reusable takeout container. Sophia noticed the absurdity of using plastic containers when trash cans across campus were filled with them. The scale of the effect containers have on the environment is shocking. As Sophia said during her Compass Speaks presentation,
“If 50 people use takeout containers every day for one academic year, that adds up to 1.5 tons in plastic waste.”
-Sophia Martin
If the actual number is closer to 100, and we account for each daily meal (3), the true amount of waste should be closer to eight or nine tons of plastic, which is outrageous. We are only one institution, and when you consider how much more waste there is if you account for schools nationwide, the environmental consequences of getting food to-go are not worth the convenience.
Sophia proposed her biodegradable container for last year’s Compass course, and received a $6,000 grant to produce her product. If every student were to use this container, those eight or nine tons of plastic waste would be reduced to zero.
“Prevention is the easiest way to cut down on waste — plastic or otherwise,”
-Sophia Martin
Sophia released her container to our student body this year.
The system works as follows: A student deposits $10 and receives a container. They bring their container to meals, fill it with food, and either eat in the dining hall or go back to their dorm to eat. If they eat in the dining hall, they return the container after their meal to be washed. If they go back to their dorm, the next time they come to the dining hall to eat they return the container to be washed. In each instance, after the container is returned to be washed, the student receives a second container, and so the process repeats.
At the end of the year, students return their container and retrieve their $10 deposit. It’s a sustainable process, everything is reused efficiently while creating significantly less waste in the process. To-Go Green is sustainable not only in a literal sense, but environmentally as well.
Sophia’s To-Go Green exemplifies the ease within environmentalism.
Obviously her grant helped immensely for the production of her project, but it was merited because of a simple, impactful idea. If To-Go Green was implemented in schools nationwide, we would drastically reduce our plastic waste, inherently helping the environment and our communities. Even in the case that it isn’t, I share Sophia’s firm belief that,
“through a collaborative effort on part of the staff and the overall school community, we can begin to develop, at the very least, mindfulness of our consumerism.”
-Sophia Martin
Such a contribution is valuable even in its most basic form; concerning ourselves with our personal wastefulness — and reducing it — is also beneficial. Coming up with an efficient, eco-friendly product like this becomes the first step in creating a green-powered infrastructure. If teenagers are coming up with solutions like these, so can the rest of the world.