The Mill Food Recycler as a Teaching Tool

How Mill Partnered with World Wildlife Fund and Arizona State University to Develop the Food Waste Futures Fellowship Program in Phoenix and the Mill Food Recycler Educators Guide

By Lou Pieh, Head of Federal Affairs   

Every day, families across the United States send millions of pounds of food scraps to the landfill. Putting food scraps into the trash is so second nature that most people don’t even think about it. But, with landfills filling up and food prices at record-highs, the very real costs of these behaviors can no longer be ignored.

What can we do to change these ingrained habits and begin to address this problem? 

The first thing Mill did was to build a food recycling system to make it easy to keep food out of the landfill. We know changing behavior is hard, and so we built a product people love, that's fun and easy to use and helps everyone understand what a valuable resource food scraps can be.  

Mill is now in over tens of thousands of homes and businesses across the U.S., and to date, customers have recycled over 11 million pounds of food scraps. We know this because Mill has an innovative connected measurement system that has uncovered first-of-its-kind data about behavior related to wasted food. Check out the latest data released here.

Even before we launched Mill in 2023, our team often reflected on the impacts of our own educational experiences learning about science and the environment. These in-classroom moments influenced the development of our core values, what we studied, and why we would eventually choose to work at a mission-focused company like Mill. 

That’s why we were so excited to kick off a partnership in July 2024 with Arizona State University’s Walton Sustainability Teachers Academy (STA) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to launch the Food Waste Futures Fellowship Program and to develop the Mill Food Recycler Educators Guide for use as a teaching tool in PreK-12 classrooms.  

The yearlong fellowship program, which concluded in June 2025, included a cohort of ten Fellows, who are PreK–12 educators from five Title I schools across the Phoenix metropolitan area. Fellows were given Mill food recyclers, stipends, and provided support from educational curriculum development and instructional professionals. 

The fellowship also included training sessions, site visits to schools for food waste audits, lesson plans, proposals, and experiential learning activities with partnering organizations that incorporate food systems sustainability and food waste reduction.  

The use of Mill in classrooms provided students with engaging, hands-on learning. And provided access to the Mill experience for those who otherwise may not have the opportunity to use the device in their home.  

Through this collaborative learning, the Fellows and their students created the Mill Food Recycler Educators Guide. Building on WWF’s Food Waste Warriors toolkit, this Guide expands resources for schools, offering activities and lessons that highlight the Mill food recycler as an impactful and easy-to-use tool to raise awareness about wasted food and to manage food scraps in the classroom. 

We are so grateful to these Fellows and their students for investing their skills, creativity, and energy to develop a resource that will extend its impact far beyond the Phoenix Valley. 

To learn more about the Food Waste Futures Fellowship, check out this blog from Loretta Lyken, one of the program’s Fellows, and this blog from Rogue, a student at Phoenix's Bioscience High School. And, if you want to use our Guide as a teaching tool in your school, please view the Mill Food Recycler Educators Guide and get a Mill food recycler for your school!