This story aired in the January 27, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Annie Tahtinen hates waste — especially plastic waste. But she loves empowering her students at Jefferson Elementary, where she’s the garden teacher. Together, they’re taking a stand against single-use plastic in school lunches served at San Francisco public schools.
Click the play button above to listen!
Story transcript:
ANNIE TAHTINEN: Okay, here we go. Okay, make way. Let's get friends in. Watch your step.
REPORTER: Lunch is starting, and the kindergarteners are first up.
TAHTINEN: Everyone watching? And we're going to put the food in here. Okay? And then, see this board? Yes. We're going to put this — plastic trays in here.
REPORTER: That’s garden teacher Annie Tahtinen — or, Ms. Annie, as she’s known here at Jefferson Elementary. She is showing students how to sort their lunch waste. At this point, things are still pretty quiet.
ANNIE: And this plastic cutlery, we're going in there. We're going to see how much we can collect, my friends.
REPORTER: But then the other classes stream in. And there's suddenly a lot more kids and a lot more noise reverberating off the lockers.
MIA WONG: So, it’s chaos. But at the same time it’s organized. We’re trying to get all the trash over there.
REPORTER: Mia Wong is in 4th grade. She’s with 5th grader Leo Tahtinen who is also Ms. Annie’s son. Mia and Leo are doing their best to keep things on track.
LEO TAHTINEN: So our goal is to, um, only the compost should be open, and the, um, trash and recycling should all go in a wheelbarrow, and we wheel out to this, um, place that we put all the trash, and it's like our exhibit.
REPORTER: This is not normal lunchtime activity. It’s called Plastic Free Lunch Week… Well, not literally, as Ms. Annie explains.
ANNIE: You know, it was a little nuanced in terms of, we knew we couldn't go plastic free.
REPORTER: Jefferson Elementary, like most primary schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, does not have a full kitchen. But, as with other district schools, it provides free meals to all students. No full kitchen means food can’t be prepared onsite. That means, for now, packaging is unavoidable.
So, Ms. Annie and students in the school’s environmental club — the green team — collect and count the lunch packaging materials. It’s a way to lobby for change by showing what could be avoided.
During the first of these events, in April of 2024, the students spread out all of the plastic packaging they’d collected.
ANNIE: I'd say about a 6-foot by 30-foot trail of trash, full of plastic trays. You know, sort of just sort of mixed bag of school lunch waste.
REPORTER: They plan to do another exhibit this time, so out in the courtyard, they and other helpers wash out any leftover crumbs from the disposable plastic trays that school lunches are served in.
Sound of washing trays
That’s where I ask Mia, Leo, and other Green Team members, including fifth grader Ryan He, what they think about the packaging:
MIA: So it's all coated in plastic. Yeah. Yes, yes.
RYAN HE: Like what's gonna happen about that? Yeah, so much plastic. That is ridiculous.
REPORTER: I ask Mia if she knows where plastic comes from.
MIA: I honestly don't know a ton, but I know it comes from stuff we're taking out of the planet that we don't want to take out of the planet.
REPORTER: Yep. Plastic is made from petroleum, drilled out of oil and gas reserves. And there’s consensus among climate scientists that we don’t want to take it out of the planet. The plastics industry releases so many greenhouse gases, that if it were a country, it would be at least the 5th largest emitter in the world. And then there are the impacts that plastic pollution has on ecosystems.
MIA: An animal can eat it. It can get, like, pollute the Earth. It can do so many things.
REPORTER: Like, degrade into microplastics. Those tiny fragments of plastic are found everywhere researchers look. Maybe you’ve heard about them in the oceans. They’re also inside our bodies — we eat, drink, and inhale them.
Scientists don’t know yet if they’re hurting our health, but they do know some chemicals found in plastic are toxic at certain doses. The FDA regulates some but not all of these chemicals, and their chance of leaching into food increases when the plastic is heated. Here’s Ms. Annie again…
ANNIE: I have heard some parents express their concern that the food is heated up. It comes warm in the plastic containers
REPORTER: So far, she says, the PTA hasn’t made a formal response to these concerns.
ANNIE: We also want to make sure we're not instilling like, you know, an amount of paranoia or concern with the children who are, you know, getting these lunches and really have no choice.
REPORTER: Students can opt to bring food from home, but the free lunch is a great benefit to them and their families — including the Tahtinens. Leo eats the free lunch most days. I sit down with him in the hallway as he’s eating. He tries to use the plastic wrapper to use as a sort of placemat
LEO: I take it out so it doesn't spill, and then they have plastic forks and spoons. This is like, um, like beef and rice and broccoli. Um, this is roasted chickpeas, um, ranch flavored.
REPORTER: You like those?
LEO: Um, they're pretty good.
REPORTER: Across the entire school district, more than five million prepackaged meals are served annually. And each meal comes with multiple pieces of single-use plastic.
Ms. Annie did ask the school district to participate in plastic free lunch week. It declined. Having to minimize costs, while sourcing nutritious food, is the driving factor for the district.
In November of 2024, voters passed a bond measure that will allow the district to build a central food hub and make improvements at schools with existing kitchens, but building out kitchens at schools like Jefferson will require future bonds.
So, today and for the next who knows how many years, millions of wrappers, utensils, and condiment containers from student lunches are landfilled annually. Only the milk cartons and plastic trays are recyclable. This waste problem might not be solved quickly, but Ms. Annie hopes advocating is good for her students.

ANNIE: I think it's important for the kids writ large to just know, when they're going — if they're going into political science or activism or environmental change — these are their jobs. So they need to know how to do coalition building.
REPORTER: And she’s planning another Plastic Free Lunch week in April.
ANNIE: We're gonna kind of contemplate what's next with the data that we get to really take action and raise awareness, but be realistic about it. You know, we need free food. We're grateful for the free food, so I always want to make sure we center that with the students.
REPORTER: She probably won’t have any trouble getting them to help.
ANNIE: Okay, let's put our vests away. We've got to get back to class first.
STUDENTS: [groaning] We do?