Students hop from class to class, sipping fruit smoothies and eating bacon-egg sandwiches, stopping in during breaks to grab a blondie or during lunch for a calzone. Minutes later, the same strawberry smoothies spill into the garbage bins, the bacon-egg sandwiches lie next to them, half-eaten, on top of dirty wrappers, and calzones with barely a bite through the crust slip under cans and plastic bags in the trash. With the great food in the cafeteria also comes great waste, and not from the producers themselves — from the students.

As of now, the amount of food waste at Parker is unacceptable. For whatever reason, students seem to be throwing away their partly eaten and even entire meals on a regular basis, and there is no good excuse. According to “Medill News Service,” Chicagoans waste 55 million pounds of food per month, with every individual at 20 pounds. And when this food is thrown away, 25 percent of U.S freshwater consumption and four percent of oil use is wasted with it.

Everything adds up — instead of either being donated or recycled, your uneaten sandwich is contributing to the 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted into the environment. Food waste is one of the highest causes of climate change, and research has shown that the annual gas emissions from wasted food is equal to adding 33 million passenger vehicles to the roads.

This is where compost bins come in. If you really can’t eat your sandwich, or tried a few bites of your ramen and realized that it wasn’t for you, dumping it in a compost bin seems pretty simple — if only Parker had a compost bin.

Elizabeth Druger, Science Department Chair and Upper School Science Teacher, agrees. According to Druger, the cafeteria does currently compost its food waste from food preparation, but “it would be great if Parker kids were to compost their food waste in addition to that.”

This seems like a simple solution — the wasted food would eventually be broken down and used as organic material. Just as Parker recycles its paper and plastic, we could recycle our food. And so limit our waste.

“Composting is actually a pretty profitable business,” Druger said. “There’s a company that comes into Zac’s kitchen and collects the food waste, and they turn that into fertilizer and all sorts of great stuff.”

But with the cafeteria doing all they can to limit food waste, the responsibility turns to the students. If compost bins were introduced to the cafeteria, would you know what could and couldn’t go in there? Would you be careful enough to ensure that your straw isn’t mixed in with your meat, your plastic cup thrown away with your milk?

“We need to educate Parker students on how to properly handle food waste,” Druger said. “As soon as someone’s plastic wrapper gets in there or straw or a fork, it will foul tons and tons of compost in the process, and the person who is making the compost will have to throw away a lot. It’s really all about the starting point and how well educated our students are.”

Even without a compost bin, students can and need to start limiting their waste. We can’t completely stop throwing away all our food from home, but we can stop throwing away our cafeteria food. If you’re going to senselessly dump a meal — one that takes hours to make — into the garbage, next time bring something from home. If you’re going to throw away a full plate of food, don’t make the cafeteria workers serve it to you, and if you’re not going to eat the food, don’t buy it.

Sure, the 30-minute lunch period is short, but it’s enough to time to eat whatever the cafeteria is serving that day. Eating slices of pizza, munching on a quesadilla, or chewing on some grilled cheese does not take all of the lunch period, so being cramped for time is no excuse.

The school should provide us with compost bins, which will only be useful if the students take advantage of them. Would you take the time to throw your food in the bin, even if it were easier to simply dump it all in the trash?

There’s no doubt that compost bins would be extremely beneficial to Parker, forcing students to take responsibility for their waste and teaching them how to recycle.  The cafeteria is working on limiting food waste. Why aren’t we? Not having compost bins now isn’t an excuse to throw away food — it’s an incentive to conserve it.