You walk up to the cafeteria trash can to throw away your empty chip bag and pause to peer inside. Instead of properly disposed-of unrecyclable and non-compostable materials, you are confronted with a chaotic mess of plastic Gatorade bottles, half-eaten sandwiches, whole bananas, and unopened yogurt containers, among other uneaten food items left to rot in the depths of the unforgiving black container. Every day atrocious amounts of food are ending up in the trash cans at Liberty, and Patriots need to pitch in and stop it.

Seeing uneaten food in the garbage makes me wonder why someone even brought the item for lunch. I understand, Patriots, that you may not want everything that comes with your lunch line meal, so that’s a different story. But if you bring lunch from home and you know you’re not going to eat a banana, don’t pack the banana, or tell your mother not to pack it!

Now let’s say you stayed late in second period and you missed half of lunch, or you’re just not hungry. At the end of lunch, do you throw away all the food you weren’t able to eat? No.

The alternative is simple and much better for the environment: take your uneaten lunch home with you and save it for an after school snack or for lunch the next day. Or, you could always give your extra eats to a hungry pal.

In a final step to reducing food waste, if you’ve been a good little Patriot and eaten all the fruit you possibly can from your apple, put the core in the compost can, not the trash can. Also important to know is that the cardboard lunch trays and the paper trays for French fries go in the compost, too.

So, my fellow Patriots, please consider these tips the next time you go to lunch. Just a few simple steps can save a great deal of food and help prevent food waste from entering landfills. If everyone pitches in, Liberty can become less wasteful and an even better place than it already is.