Since participating in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Recovery Challenge in 2011, KSC has been regionally awarded for food waste prevention. However, this is the first year that KSC has been recognized nationally for not only food waste prevention, but also outreach and education for students.
Sustainable Material Management Specialist Heather Greenwood said, “We collect about forty tons a year of kitchen scraps alone. We try to keep as much of that out of the landfills as possible.”
KSC composts many food items before they even hit the dining room, such as carrot peels, the insides of peppers and other food scraps. “The biggest way we try to manage food waste is by getting people to think about what they are eating, but more accurately, what they are not eating,” Greenwood said.
Greenwood said that she will be accepting an award made out of recycled glass on behalf of KSC in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Regarding the student body, the “spokesvegetable” is one way KSC educates students about food waste.
“The carrot represents everything that your food goes through from the time it’s beginning to grow until it ends up in a landfill or compost. It’s not just about the carrot that is on your plate that you are throwing away, it’s about the soil that the farmer needs to manage and cultivate and the time that’s spent in planting the seeds, getting all the weeds out and harvesting the vegetable and then to get them shipped to the facility,” Greenwood said.
General Manager of Dining Services Josef Quirinale said,“It has a steel structure on the inside and paper mache on the outside. It was to tell students about the life of a carrot. It takes three months to grow it from seed. It takes how many days to ship it from wherever it’s coming from. It takes an hour or two to prepare it, but it takes a second to wipe if off your plate.”
KSC also displays a “waste buffet” that contains wasted food in perfectly good condition as a visual for students to realize how much food is wasted. “One year, we built a structure out of cardboard boxes, but each box had a weight to it. Students didn’t know what it was all about. Throughout the week, they just saw this structure we built in the dining room. All the boxes symbolized all the food that was thrown away. It was to give a visual to what really goes on,” Quirinale said.
According to Quirinale, every pound of food that is wasted equals an average of a $1.70. When you multiply $1.70 by the 40 tons of food that is wasted each year in the Dining Commons, it adds up.
Greenwood mentioned ways to figure out how much food is actually wasted in the dining commons.
“The food scrapings that the ECO reps do helps us figure out how many ounces or pounds that are getting thrown away from every plate. Maybe there will be one thousand swipes during a meal period and we’ll have so many pounds. We can figure out how many pounds per swipe is being thrown out,” Greenwood said.
The first year that KSC started its initiatives in educating students regarding wasting food, they made almost $200,000. According to Quirinale, that $200,000 goes back into the Dining Commons’s budget to provide a variety of different options.
The goal for KSC is to develop a post-consumer plan to compost food scraps after students throw them away. “We did a pilot program for post-consumer composting back in 2012 and we learned a lot. Since then, we’ve been working on revamping it and coming up with solutions to some of the issues,” Greenwood said.
“We would love to develop a plan where the post-consumer waste is also composted. That can’t be composted on this campus because legally, it needs to be treated at a certain temperature for over a period of seven days. We don’t have the facilities to do that,” Quirinale said.
Quirinale said that the post-consumer plan is to eventually ship it somewhere so it can be composted.
KSC sophomore Rachel MacKinnon said, “I feel like it is a problem. For the most part I don’t think students pay attention to how much food they are actually wasting. I see it more in the dining commons. It is a place where students can grab unlimited amounts so I think that has to play a role in the waste problem.”
MacKinnon said that even though she recognizes the issue, she understands how food wasting can happen.
“I look at the dishwasher belt and often see plates full of food. I wouldn’t say I don’t do it myself because I do. But when I waste food, I do feel slightly guilty about it. I don’t mean to waste, I just don’t feel as hungry as my eyes thought I was when looking at the food,” MacKinnon said.
Jacob can be contacted at jknehr@kscequinox.com
