Fighting Food Waste: An Interview with Environmental Activist Bhavik Menon
Insights from an Inspiring Texas Teen
Unfortunately, the United States leads the globe, producing over 80 billion pounds of wastage every year. With these numbers it seems unlikely that our future will be able to see a green earth. However, one Texas teen’s inspiring story proves the idea that real change can be made through everyday efforts.
How does he do it?
He tackles large problems one step at a time.
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Bhavik Menon, a rising junior from Cypress Ranch High School, and ask about his experiences in environmental activism.
Can you give the readers a quick background of yourself including your name, where you’re from, and a view of your hobbies and passions?
BM: Hello everyone, my name is Bhavik Menon. I’m a rising junior at Cypress Ranch High School. Over the past year, especially in the summer, I’ve been managing my own non-profit called the Kosmos Project, and have started my own environmental club. Through this club, we’ve been working on a lot of impactful things during the school year. In terms of hobbies, I enjoy art, drawing, and playing sports such as basketball and soccer. I also follow sports programs such as the NFL, NBA, and MLB.
Can you explain your journey in pursuing environmental activism?
BM: My journey began during the pandemic when I was in 9th grade. I originally wanted to be an architect, and I focused on creating green designs in my architecture classes. Around that time, I changed from wanting to be an architect to an environmental lawyer. I looked at the scope of the change I wanted to create, and found that becoming a lawyer would give me a lot more opportunities to spark this change. In my sophomore year, I started my environmental club. It started out pretty small with cleanups around the neighborhood. However, I quickly found that these actions would only lead to temporary change. For example, if we cleaned up the beach one day, the next day it would become dirty again and that wouldn’t be useful. I then focused a lot more on what we can do at school. One of the biggest things we’ve done is reinstating recycling at our school. Our district had originally dismantled their recycling policies, because it cost too much money which they thought they were wasting.
This led to our club asking the school board if students could please recycle. We promised to pick up the recycling at the end of the day, and dispose of it properly. I was thinking if we could get this passed throughout the entire school, it would spark a lot of change. Although it took 6–7 months, we were finally able to expand it inside of the whole school around May. It was really influential as when state testing and AP testing rolled around, we’d have up to 20 full bags of recycled paper. Without us, all of this paper would be going to waste. It was really empowering to see how much we were doing. I decided to scale this even larger, with a three prong approach to reform all environmental aspects of the school.
This was through recycling, building a memorial garden, and implementing a cafeteria plan. We wanted to build a memorial garden for a faculty member that had passed away, who was really inspiring to all of us. This fall, we will be working on the garden and adding our own section to grow fruits and vegetables. This whole plan will be student funded and student run. In terms of our cafeteria plan, we’ve added garbage bins for food waste that students wouldn’t eat such as apples, oranges, and bread. All of this food would then be composted and re-added to our garden. We’ve also added a garbage bin for the styrofoam food plates that kids would be disposing off. This waste would then be added to our recycling initiative.
I have also started a student run environmental coalition for all of the environmental club presidents in my area. There’s about 6 of us, and we will be drawing up a social and financial proposal on how beneficial it would be to bring back recycling to our entire school district. We hope to enact this plan in the spring semester of next year. As a part of this plan, we are also trying to enact an environmental club at all of our local middle schools to help promote environmental activism at an early age.
Could you tell us more about the Kosmos Project?
BM: I started the project with the goal of scale. For example, if you look at the United States you think of problems such as gun violence, abortion, and economic inequality. However, if you look at a city or more local scale you see problems with the water systems, city infrastructure, and medical infrastructure.
That’s what I really wanted to touch on, because there are so many places where you tend to see the general problems, which leads to underreported problems. Through the Kosmos Project, we use crowdsourced data to bring awareness towards these local issues. Once we’ve identified these issues we try to solve them by contacting non-profit organizations who work on solving a similar problem.
To gather this crowdsourced data, we’ve set up google forms where volunteers are able to enter their name (optional), where they’re from, the general category that the problem falls into, and a category that describes this issue in more detail.
Can you explain to us what your role looks like as a Summer Research Assistant at Texas A&M? What areas does your scientific research cover?
BM: I started my scientific research in July through reaching out and a professor has added me to something they’ve been working on. Our research is based on lightning: where does the lighting strike, where do the bolts occur, and how many people does this impact. It’s not a very detailed project- it’s more of a broad topic of lightning in the Houston Area through examining the HMLA (Houston Mapping Lightning Array).
I found this role through networking with a connection that I had at Texas A&M, and they set me up with this professor.
Do you have any advice for teens who want to take initiative and spark change?
BM: My main piece of advice is that although it may seem daunting, you can’t think of attacking a problem or objective as a whole. You have to first start with smaller tasks and work your way up. For example, in my case of reinstating the recycling initiative, I first started with adding recycling at one branch of our school and then working on another, and then another etc.
I think this idea applies to multiple facets in life; you have to take an incremental approach or a sequential approach to solving a problem. Personally, I took a sequential approach where I started at a smaller scale and worked my way up. I worked on building on the foundations that I have set up in the past to reach a larger goal in the future.
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