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The 2025 — 2026 Future City Competition Theme
Farm to Table
Overview: Farm to Table Challenge
While humans once grew food wherever they lived, today most of our food travels to us from far away. Modern cities make it easy to get groceries from the store—but at a cost. The way we grow, package, and throw away food creates problems for our planet. In fact, about 40% of all food produced ends up wasted, even as 783 million people around the world go hungry.
Consider all the steps it takes to get food to your plate: farmers grow it, trucks move it, stores sell it, and finally, you eat it—or maybe you don’t. But wasted food doesn’t just disappear in a landfill—food waste takes up 28% of the world’s agricultural area, uses 25% of all water used by agriculture each year, and creates about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s why cities of the future need to rethink how food moves through our lives. One big idea is using the principles of circular economy along the food production pathway —a system where instead of throwing things away, we find ways to reuse, recycle, or repurpose them.
In recent years, engineers, scientists, farmers, manufacturers, and city planners are coming up with exciting new solutions like using waste products to feed livestock, designing reusable food packaging, and using smart bins that turn scraps into compost or energy. These systems don’t just eliminate waste, they protect the planet and keep communities strong.
The students’ challenge:
Design a city that eliminates food waste from farm to table and keeps your citizens healthy and safe.
The mission of the DiscoverE Future City Competition is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for middle school students that combines a stimulating engineering challenge with a "hands-on" application to present their vision of a city of the future.
The Philadelphia Regional Future City Competition is a 501.c.3 educational outreach program of DiscoverE. We are one of over 50 regional programs conducted throughout the the United States and the world with the goal to introduce middle school students to the engineering profession.
The Philadelphia Regional Competition draws schools from Philadelphia and surrounding counties including the Lehigh Valley, Southern New Jersey and Delaware. Students from middle schools and after school programs in the region form teams consisting of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students who work with a teacher and an engineer mentor from September to January.
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For Web site Information see Steering Committee
Where are the Future City schools - 2023?
Last Modified 09/13/2025