Recycling 101: Campus Dining Halls Use Biodegradable Material
BY MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
It’s lunchtime at Salem College. On today’s menu: salmon, wraps and the salad bar. Students are crowded at long tables, eating and talking.
Something’s missing, though. It’s the fundamental tool of most cafeterias – the tray.
Cafeterias on local college campuses are trying to become greener by saving energy and water and reducing food waste. In the process, they’re doing away with some dining-hall mainstays.
Wake Forest University went trayless last year and replaced Styrofoam take-out containers and plastic flatware with boxes made out of biodegradable molded fiber sugar cane, and corn-based plastic flatware.
UNC School of the Arts started ditching the trays on weekends last year.
Salem College stopped using trays at the beginning of the school year. And resident students are being given reusable aqua-colored plastic boxes to carry away food. The boxes are called EcoClamshells. They’re made by GET Enterprises and were developed by Eckerd College in Florida.
At the entrance to the Refectory, Salem’s dining hall, an employee takes students’ used take-out containers and hands them clean ones that have been through the cafeteria’s dishwasher. The students then take the boxes through the cafeteria lines, filling them with food. They swap dirty boxes for clean ones when they come back for another meal.
Some students shrug over their trayless state. Apparently it wasn’t cool to use them before anyway.
“A lot of teachers used them,” said Sarah Webster, a senior from Raleigh, looking up from a plate of macaroni and cheese. “If you forget something, you just get up and go get it. It’s not a very big cafeteria either.”
The students have more to say about the reusable take-out containers. Webster used to use two Styrofoam containers to pack her meals. She said that the Eco-Clamshell is sturdier and roomier – but you have to remember to bring it back if you want to take your food out of the cafeteria. No EcoClamshell, no take-out.
“They’re kind of annoying because you have to keep up with them,” said Webster, who sometimes forgets hers in her car.
Julie Daniels, a senior from Wagoner, Okla., used to skirt around the Styrofoam to-go boxes by filing up her plate, then transferring her meals into a Tupperware container. “The fact that it didn’t biodegrade, it’s an issue,” she said of the old boxes. “and our landfills are full.”
Salem bought the Eco-Clamshells for its students after Anna Gallimore, Salem’s director of administration, saw them featured on a television news show.
“It was reusable, affordable, it had already been introduced on college campuses,” Gallimore said. “Our students use many to-go containers. They like to go outside to eat. They like to take it back to their room.”
Gallimore said that the college used 20,000 Styrofoam to-go boxes last year. “We went to zero,” she added.
Salem College officials hope that the Clamshells last four years before they need to be replaced. Faculty, staff and nonresident students can buy them for $5 apiece.
Cafeterias without trays not only use less water, they also use less food, local college officials said.
Aramark, the food-service provider for many local colleges, including Salem, WFU and UNCSA, studied 25 colleges last year and found a 25 to 30 percent reduction in food waste in trayless cafeterias, or about 1.2 to 1.8 ounces a person each meal. The study estimated that it takes one-third to half a gallon of water to wash each tray. The company has been pushing for removing trays since then. Aramark serves food at more than 500 institutions.
College officials have to balance going green with staying in the black. UNCSA has traded its Styrofoam boxes for clear plastic ones that can be recycled, though it’s up to diners to do that on their own. “Of course, the environmentally-friendly alternative would be to go to corn-based plastic, but it’s too expensive now,” said Carol Cooper, the director of auxiliary services.
This is also where sustainability can get confusing. Corn-based plastic sounds promising, but to break down, it generally needs to be taken to a commercial composting facility.
And though trayless dining may be saving energy, water and food, meals probably won’t be getting cheaper for students.
Not every college has gone trayless. Winston-Salem State University is studying the idea, said college spokesman Aaron Singleton.
UNSCA noticed a reduction in food waste when it experimented with trayless meals. But since the school has high-school students with 35 to 40 minutes to eat lunch, school officials decided not to do away with the trays entirely. “We were afraid they wouldn’t have enough time to sit down and eat their meal and digest it,” Cooper said.
At Wake Forest, some students first complained about the lack of trays. But they seem to have gotten used to it, said Cassie Freund, the president of Wake Forest’s Student Environmental Action Coalition, a student group that promotes environmental awareness. “It’s something that most students experience at least once a day, especially people who live on campus, and it uses a lot of resources – water, food, trash.
“It’s a small change that makes a difference. Just small things sometimes are helpful, and it shows students you don’t have to do something large to help the environment.”
Recycling is actually still an issue at Wake Forest, Freund said. There are no recycling bins outside around campus, something that she would like to change. “The problem is mainly student awareness. Last year’s freshman class and this year’s are better about recycling,” she said.
WFU’s food and recycling programs received a B on the college’s latest sustainability report card from the nonprofit Sustainable Endowments Institute. WFU as a whole received a C-. It was the only area college to be graded by the institute.
Salem has taken other seemingly small and simple environmentally friendly measures that Gallimore said are also saving the college money. The incandescent light blubs in the Refectory have been replaced with compact-fluorescent bulbs. Simply turning off the lights in the 20 vending machines on campus could save the college $925 in energy costs, according to an energy audit done there last year. “They’re on 24/7,” Gallimore said. “Twenty machines is not a lot of machines. You think of a larger campus and that could be even more substantial.
“It’s important to our environment…and it reduces costs and our carbon footprint. It’s become a way of life for all of us.”
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