From organic waste to green shoots: Hanoi students and nus students explore the circular food journey

Hanoi generates around 8,400 tonnes of household solid waste every day, according to the city's Department of Agriculture and Environment and is now strengthening waste separation at source, including the separation of food waste for organic recycling. It's into that gap that a group of secondary school students stepped, spending two days turning what they'd normally throw away into compost.

Thanh and her classmates had just taken part in an exchange session on organic composting. The lesson started with things they already knew: a vegetable peel, a scrap of paper, a handful of dry leaves. From there, the lesson went further than Thanh expected, into what happens to that peel after it's thrown away.

This is also the spirit of "Rooting for Change", a series of exchange and hands-on learning activities bringing together students from three secondary schools in Hanoi - Yen Hoa, Nam Trung Yen and Truong Cong Giai - and a group of students from the National University of Singapore (NUS), with the collaboration of Rikolto and the Centre for Community and Environment Development Initiatives (C&E).

The activities that Thanh mentioned were organised in August 2026 as part of Rikolto's Good Food at School project in Vietnam.

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2024-2026: a partnership taking shape

The connection between NUS and secondary schools in Hanoi began in 2024, when NUS started working with Rikolto to explore school food systems in Vietnam.

In 2025, the first group of NUS students, led by lecturer Jerome KOK, came to Vietnam and worked with Rikolto and C&E to organise nutrition-focused exchange activities at Yen Hoa and Nam Trung Yen Secondary Schools.

In 2026, Jerome returned to Vietnam with a new group of university students, working again with Rikolto and C&E. In January of that year, 60 students from Yen Hoa, Nam Trung Yen and Truong Cong Giai Secondary Schools began learning about organic composting with the NUS students.

Nam Trung Yen was the first to take it further, moving lessons into hands-on practice in the school garden. They started to show students how to cut up vegetables, dry leaves and eggshells, sorted the materials and layered them in a compost bin. Through this, the idea was to motivate them to imagine a circular system within their own school - vegetables and eggshells from the school kitchen, along with dry leaves from the school grounds, turned into compost that returns nutrients to plants, while those plants become food for people again.

By August, that hands-on practice had extended to the other two schools, Yen Hoa and Truong Cong Giai.

Truong Cong Giai Secondary Schools began learning about organic composting with the NUS students.