Lahaina, HI | gretchen@westmauigreencycle.com

Gretchen Losano is the founder of West Maui Green Cycle.  While working diligently for the last 6 years to start a commercial composting facility in West Maui, she started the School Food Waste composting program in 2019, and has recieved enthusiastic county support for this program’s expansion during the last three years.  She has given several presentations to the Maui County Council about the program and about compostiong in general, and has been a resource person at Maui County Council committee and full council meetings regarding single-use plastics diversion and composting.  She was also a single-use plastics educator and has given many presentations to middle school and high school students on the topic.  Recently she has presented about West Maui Green Cycle Programs to Zero Waste Hawaii’s annual Zero Waste Summit and Zero Waste Maui’s Summit.

Session Code: F6

Track: Diversion and Collection

Session Name: Innovative Case Studies

Session Time: Thursday, Jan 26, 2:00 – 3:30 PM

Presentation Title: School Food Waste Composting and Reusables Program

Presentation Description: Currently, every public Department of Education school in Hawaii is using single use trays and utensils for every meal and throwing out most of the food waste, creating hundreds of thousands of lbs of trash every year, unnecessarily. In Maui, Hawaii West Maui Green Cycle’s School Food Waste Composting Program has successfully moved past the pilot phase of our program to a county funded expansion to 5 schools. This expansion also includes a new reusables pilot program in 2 of the 5 schools, where West Maui Green Cycle has partnered with EcoLab Hawaii and is moving forward with dishwasher installation, and will be utilizing reusable trays and utensils. This will be the first pilot of its kind for public schools in all of Hawaii. The goal of this presentation will be to describe  the process of starting a school food waste composting program and will ideally be paired with a half-day demo session to show the specific pile construction for this school program.