Jericho High School students innovate with Evergreen app to tackle food waste

LONG ISLAND - For Jericho High School students Arjun Bindra, his brother Jeevan, and their friend Yashwin Shaja it started as a social innovation challenge. The topic was sustainable school.

"I thought I could create a solution to help schools be more sustainable, help students have better food, and possibly prevent food from being wasted," Arjun said.

The trio developed an app called Evergreen - to collect data on favorite foods.

"We understand what dishes people like, what ingredients people like, and how we could use those ingredients to create something new," Jeevan said.

While it’s still in the prototype phase, the plan is to start at colleges and move into high schools. The goal is to adjust lunch menus to eliminate waste.

"We can sort of track the data on how students consume foods and show them to the schools to maximize the foods they want to produce to be best for students overall," Shaja said.

The average student carrying a packed lunch produces about 67 pounds of waste yearly. The World Wildlife Fund estimates food waste in U.S. schools to reach 530,000 tons annually.