Students discover disturbing truth about their cafeteria meals and demand action: 'Younger generations … have to think about their future'

Students in the Houston Independent School District are challenging the area's choice of lunch trays.

According to the Houston Chronicle, a trio of fourth-grade students, Celine David, Maddie Wood, and Dora Cabarcas, are leading the charge against the district's single-use, Styrofoam lunch trays.

"We believe that HISD school district should provide schools with better, environmentally friendly, healthy and safer materials for our school cafeteria," Wood said.

Polystyrene is a serious problem for the environment; it contributes massively to the Earth's plastic pollution problem, as it sits in landfills for centuries because it doesn't fully decompose naturally. What it does do, though, is break apart, creating tiny particles of plastic that wind up in the environment, polluting the soil and waterways, and wreaking environmental havoc.

On top of that, while it can be an effective and food-safe material to make trays out of, hot or fatty foods can cause it to leach chemicals, making it far less safe.

These students aren't the only ones trying to find ways to combat plastic pollution. A company in Europe is trying to push for more recyclable plastics used in containers, while researchers in Japan are working on a biodegradable plastic that dissolves in salt water. And a Finnish company is exploring the possibility of making plastic using carbon capture technology.

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The trio of students met with Houston ISD superintendent Mike Miles in early April and noted that switching to reusable or biodegradable trays would remove 22 million Styrofoam trays from landfills each year. They proposed several alternatives, including reusable plastic or bamboo trays, as well as trays made from sugar cane that could have a cheaper upfront cost.

"Older people might think, 'Oh, well, it doesn't really bother me if the world gets covered in trash, because I'm not going to be alive then,'" Cabarcas said. "But the younger generations, they have to think about their future and the future of younger generations, because they're still going to be alive on this planet for a long time to come."

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