Key takeaways:
Toward Zero Waste’s SHARE program teaches students to reduce food waste and help feed hungry classmates.
The program has grown from eight pilot schools in spring 2025 to 37 schools, and more schools are waiting to join.
Advocates say adding dairy could let schools recover even more food, but that would require changes to state food-safety guidance.
By Will Atwater
At Olive Chapel Elementary in Apex, students are learning that what they leave on their lunch trays can help feed someone else.
Since joining SHARE — Stop Hunger and Restore Earth — in 2025, the Wake County public school has turned food waste into a hands-on lesson in fighting hunger and protecting the environment.
The SHARE program “ensures that all kids are fed,” said Ashley Charles, one of the school’s assistant principals. “For kids who maybe don’t have snacks or [who] need extra food, it’s a way that we can save food and make sure they’re getting what they need.”
That need became clear in the cafeteria, where staff saw how much unopened and unpeeled food was being tossed each day. Teacher assistants assigned to lunch duty had voiced concerns for years about the volume of uneaten food waste ending up in the trash.
“When we found out that this program existed, we were like, ‘Okay, it’s time. We’re going to give this a try,’” she said.
SHARE is a food recovery program created by Toward Zero Waste, a North Carolina-based nonprofit, alongside Wake County Public School System. The goal is to “capture wholesome leftovers from Child Nutrition Services and feed students, rather than landfills,” Megan Holler, director of food recovery and compost for Toward Zero Waste, wrote in an email to NC Health News.
The program started with eight Wake County public schools in 2025 and has expanded to 37, with more waiting to join, Holler wrote. She said early data suggest that about 41 food items are recovered daily from each school.
Food recovery, climate impact
The average person in the U.S. generates more than $700 worth of food waste each year — and for a family of four, the average is nearly $3,000, according to a 2025 EPA report. Yet in North Carolina, about one in five children don’t get enough to eat, according to a report by the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund.
The EPA estimates that wasted food makes up about a quarter of what ends up in municipal solid waste landfills. As that food decomposes, it generates methane, a potent greenhouse gas that accelerates global warming. SHARE works to disrupt this cycle by keeping more edible food available to students and out of the trash.
While the food recovery program can’t resolve Wake County’s food waste problem, it is reducing the food that enters the landfill, one school at a time. This could be an encouraging sign for county officials: The South Wake Landfill, where all of the county’s waste ends up, is expected to reach capacity between 2040 and 2045, according to the Wake County government.
“In our Wake County program and our 37 operational schools,” Holler said, “we’re finding that, by and large, the food that is donated to the SHARE collection carts in the cafeteria is either taken during meals or later in the day.”
She added, “On Friday, there’s almost nothing left to be reviewed or cleaned at all because it is going right back out to students.”
Grab and go
When students go through the lunch line and later decide they don’t want a sealed item, such as a bag of apple slices, baby carrots, a banana, a juice carton, an applesauce cup or a packaged snack, they can place it on a designated cart rather than throwing it away, Holler explained.
During lunch, other students can freely take anything from this supervised cart. After the meal period ends, leftover items are moved to a refrigerator and pantry cart stationed in a part of the building that’s visible to staff and easy for students to reach, such as the front office or a student services suite. Throughout the day, kids can grab something between classes, on their way to the bus or carpool line, or before after-school activities.
“Teachers … can go and get the items themselves and take them back to the classroom for a snack later in the day, or they can just send their kids to pick out something — anybody can have access,” Charles said.
Because the program operates inside a regulated food environment, SHARE follows strict rules about what can and cannot be collected. Staff and students are limited to unopened items provided by the school’s Child Nutrition Services, Holler said.
They are not allowed to accept food from home, anything that’s been opened, or pop-top fruit cups that could be opened and reclosed. Under current state guidance, they also cannot recover milk, yogurt or cheese sticks — foods considered “time and temperature control for safety” items — even though these are some of the most commonly wasted products. To stay within state and federal guidelines, SHARE focuses on shelf-stable packaged foods, whole fruits with non-edible peels (such as oranges and bananas), and a narrow set of cold items that regulators do not classify as time- and temperature-sensitive.
A user-friendly system
Toward Zero Waste assumes liability for the program through its agreement with Wake County Public Schools. The nonprofit supplies the collection carts, fridges, signs and educational materials, trains school staff, and conducts regular check-ins to make sure the system is working as intended. With help from Wake County’s community services and solid waste staff, they periodically inspect school sites, talk with personnel and students, and review how food is being handled and distributed.
At least once a week, designated staff or supervised students go through the fridge and pantry cart, check dates and freshness, remove anything that no longer meets program guidelines, and clean the equipment.
Elizabeth Hannah, principal of Apex’s Lufkin Road Middle School, said that the support provided by SHARE helps ensure the program’s success.
“They gave me great messaging to send to our families to help them understand what we are doing and why we are doing it,” Hannah said. “You really can’t ask for a more organized process or plan — and a tremendous amount of support in terms of anything that you need or any questions that you have. They’re very quick to answer, and they’ll give us little tips along the way.”
Charles agrees that the Toward Zero Waste team provides the support needed to make the SHARE program successful.
“This program directly targets a need that we had already observed; we just didn’t know what to do ourselves,” Charles said. “Megan Holler and her team do the work for you. They provide the cart you use to collect the items, the mini fridge and the signs you put around the building — plus slide shows and videos that teach students and teachers how to use it.”
For Charles and Hannah, the program’s open design — any student can take food from the cart — is central to its success.
The two administrators said the program teaches children that keeping uneaten food out of the trash ensures that more food is available to others and helps protect the environment. They also pointed out that making food available to all students eliminates the shame that can be associated with being identified as a kid in need.
Holler sums it up this way: “If you pull a banana out of your fruit bowl and you sit down to eat lunch, and then you decide, ‘Oh, I don’t really want this banana after all,’ you’re not going to throw it away. You’re going to put it back for someone else in the family to grab later — and that’s the concept, right?”
“It’s giving students a chance to learn, to empathize with their peers,” she added. “They’re learning environmental stewardship by learning that we don’t have to throw everything away.”
The next chapter
While the SHARE program is growing, with more schools wanting to participate, Holler would like to see more food items saved from becoming food waste. Saving milk and other dairy items is not supported because of food safety regulations from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.
In an email to NC Health News, Holler said that if regulators support it, Toward Zero Waste would collaborate with other local food recovery stakeholders to develop guidelines for schools to collect and store dairy and other time- and temperature-controlled foods safely — using cooling trays, ice baths or coolers in the cafeteria and refrigerators for longer storage once meal service ends.
Toward Zero Waste is asking the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to update their guidelines so schools can safely collect unopened dairy items, such as milk and yogurt, on sharing tables. Other states, including South Carolina and Virginia, have adopted similar approaches.
“The NC Food Code does not regulate donated food and handling of such foods,” said a DHHS spokesperson in response to a NC Health News query on the possibility of recovering milk and dairy products. “NC DHHS’s Environmental Health Section is planning to further discuss this topic with [the Department of Public Instruction] as our shared goal is to ensure the safe handling of unopened milk, yogurt, and other TCS (Time/Temperature Control for Safety) foods for donation.”
For Holler and educators, those conversations could determine how much of the food waste in cafeterias can instead help students learn on a full stomach — without adding to climate-warming emissions by contributing to landfill waste.
“We as educators know that our students learn best if their basic needs are met,” Hannah said. “This program allows us to provide unopened, wholesome food, while also not harming the environment by creating waste out of that food.
“We’re able to make sure that students who are hungry have a little extra opportunity to get something to eat.”
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