By Heather Fabritze
News Editor
The Compost Club temporarily expanded their existing food scraps program to gain a deeper understanding of the waste that students generate from their daily meals at the dining hall.
Volunteers set up a table in front of the tray return station in Hodson Hall with three buckets and a scale. Each bucket collected a different type of throwaway item, including food waste, recyclables, and single-use trash.
Over the course of nine hours, the club collected 87 pounds of compost food waste, two pounds of recycling, and nine pounds of trash from over 750 visitors to the dining hall.
The Compost Club and other student environmental organizations, with the support of the Center for Environment and Society, hope to turn the audit’s data into a campaign that would reduce food waste on a wider scale.
Starting at the end of last spring, volunteers started collecting food scraps from the kitchen and other prep stations. CES Associate Director of Civic Engagement Laura Chamberlin said that this program did not initially include waste from visitors because they wanted to have a better understanding of the possibilities of the compost system.
“We weren’t collecting waste from post-consumer waste, in part because we really wanted to understand better the capacity of the composting system in the garden before we just started overloading it with a bunch of compost from the dining hall, especially compost that would have dairy, and eggs, and meat and things like that in it,” Chamberlin said.
In hopes of expanding the program, WC gave Elm staff writer sophomore Hope Benjamin the task of researching similar initiatives on other D3 campuses. The rest of the audit was also student-led.
According to freshman Danielle Didomenico, who spearheaded the effort this semester, participants and the dining hall staff were both incredibly receptive to the idea. Although volunteers at the table had to explain the system at lunch time, visitors grew accustomed by dinner hours.
“We were telling people where to put it and they were like, ‘Oh, I know that already,’” Didomenico said. “I feel like it caught on after one day. Maybe we could do a couple days of hand holding, of making sure people do the right things. I think eventually we can just put a little compost bucket there so people can do it themselves.”
While it is unlikely that the volunteers will develop the initiative more before the end of this semester, their final goal is to have a consistent program in place before freshmen come to campus in the fall, which would ensure that the Class of 2029 would never know a version of the College that does not encourage compost in the dining hall.
“We have people standing there, monitoring them, talking to them, making sure they put things in the right bucket,” Chamberlin said. “[Making] sure they understand why we’re doing it, why it’s important. So, if we did it even just a couple more times, suddenly we have a dining hall that can compost, and the excuse of, ‘People don’t know how to compost,’ wouldn’t be valid anymore.”
Outside of making composting an automatic habit, the environmental clubs hoped that hearing results from the audit would make waste issues more relevant to the community. Chamberlin said that self-serve dining halls like the one at WC often produce more waste on average because students are still learning how to build healthy relationships with food.
Giving students opportunities to see how much waste Hodson Hall actually creates encourages them to learn tips for how to reduce their own contribution.
“I think it’s important just so students on campus and different faculty can see how much waste they produce, and they can actually see it in person and visualize what their impact is making on our environment and planet,” Benjamin said. “I feel like it’s just important for our school to keep this going and try to reduce our waste more.”
Outside of sharing their findings with the campus and the dining hall, Compost Club wants to establish an official campaign for decreasing food waste, including putting up informative posters in the dining hall.
Using the audit’s results, the organizations would then have a benchmark for how effectively campus reduces food waste in the future.
Former Student Government Association Secretary of the Environment junior Mel Tuerk said that they would love to space out future audits over the course of the week to see how different days produce different amounts of waste and what food is specifically not being eaten. They are also excited to see how the campaign influences these results.
“You’ll probably see [posters] around to encourage less food waste and serving yourself smaller portions,” Tuerk said. “So, hopefully we see some change.”
According to Tuerk, the Compost Club is in the process of making their waste piles more high-tech so that they can accommodate all the dining hall’s waste in the future. Various garden and meadow projects around campus and in Chestertown will then use this compost to better the greater community.
Photo by Ella Humphreys.
Photo Caption: Signs are the centerpiece of Compost Club’s campaign to reduce food waste in the dining hall.