Compost Confusion

Most Ohio University students have eaten countless meals at the on-campus dining locations. There are four sit-down dining halls and four grab-and-go locations where meal plan swipes are accepted and buffet-style meals are served. Students also have the option to eat at Baker University Center’s West 82 where food items are individually purchased with cash. The process at each of the sit-down dining halls is the same: enter, grab a tray, follow a line of hungry students where one will pass innumerable food options and load up the tray with whatever foods appeal to you at that moment. There is at least one problem with this system – most students find no reason to limit the amount of food they put on their trays.

Stephanie Marvin is an OU junior employed at Boyd Dining Hall; some of her shifts are spent with the trays students return to the kitchen when they are finished with their meals. She is responsible for disposing of the food waste and cleaning the dishes. Typically, according to Marvin, less than one-third of trays returned to the kitchen after each meal are clear of any food waste. Therefore, one could infer that students who go to the dining hall for meals are putting more food on their plates than they can eat. “The food that comes back on trays from the students goes down a garbage disposal for the most part,” says Marvin. “We throw away chicken bones and fruit peels in a trash can and I’m not really sure what is done with the food that wasn’t served at all.” Why Boyd is not composting the food waste collected in its dining hall when there are compost bins at multiple locations across campus, can be contributed to the size of OU’s compost facility.

According to OU’s Interim Sustainability Coordinator Erin Sykes, compost is only being collected at three campus locations at this time and the only dining hall where compost is being picked up is Shively. The other two locations are Baker and the Central Food Facility, which houses a bakery, test kitchen and vegetable preparation site and acts as a central food warehouse. Food waste from all other dining locations goes to a landfill. The compost system currently in place can hold 28 tons of compostable material annually, which is roughly 50 percent of the food waste generated at OU, according to the OU Office of Sustainability’s website. “We have received federal funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to expand our compost site which we anticipate will allow us to pick up from 100 percent of our dining facilities,” says Sykes. The OU Office of Sustainability was awarded $1,088,571 for this expansion that is expected to be completed sometime this year, according to its website.

In the meantime, the sustainability officials have been testing different methods of reducing the amount of food waste generated at the dining halls. Waste auditing, a practice that involves examining on-campus dining facilities’ levels of waste, is one method that Sykes and her colleagues have been using to look at the effect portion size has on food waste. Ways that they have studied this effect include holding half-portion nights, offering food samples, removing a number of trays from use and hosting an education night on the issue of food waste in sustainability.

Focusing on portion sizes seems to be a good starting point. According to Marvin, one or two “spoonfuls” constitutes a portion size at the dining halls. “I have never personally been asked to give someone a smaller portion,” she says. “I think that it is more normal for people to ask for more.” It is common to walk through an OU dining hall and see students with a tray full of food fit to feed a family of four. Sykes reports that on half-portion nights, the amount of food waste was slightly decreased. During a week of waste audits held at Nelson in 2009, the amount of food waste generated without any change to the dining hall’s operation totaled 5.54 oz./person for a Monday meal. Compare that amount with the 4.68 oz./person food waste generated on Tuesday when smaller portions were served (“Food Waste Audits”). It would seem logical that this should be a common practice and not just done on select nights in select dining halls.

There are times when one student can be seen carrying multiple trays while traversing the dining halls. The Office of Sustainability attempted to reduce food waste by reducing the number of available trays in the dining halls at mealtime. In doing so, many students were forced to carry plates of food and thus, were able to carry far less than they could with a tray. In a series of waste audits held in 2008, it was found that when comparing the amount of edible food waste after a meal when all trays were in use (5.24 oz. /person) to a meal when no trays were available for use (4.52 oz./person), it was more sustainable to force students to carry plates of food. The typical food waste amount gathered from an audit held at Nelson in 2009 was 5.54 oz./person, when compared with the “tray-less” meal’s food waste (6.02 oz./person), one can see that the tray-less meal did not help reduce food waste on that day (“Food Waste Audits”). Basically, measuring waste at tray-less meals should take place more than the usual once a year in order to definitively determine whether or not it is effective.

Another cause could be that some students do not have ample time to eat a meal between classes and while the dining hall is still open for said meal; thus, these students load up trays on the first trip through the dining line because they will not have time to go back for seconds if they’re still hungry. One solution is allowing students more grab-and-go options and has gone into effect this quarter (Winter 2011) with the opening of a grab-and-go at Jefferson, previously just a dining hall. Grab-and-go gives students the ability to get a meal at hours of the day in between mealtimes when the dining halls are closed and sets a limit on the amount of food each student can take with him/her. Whether or not the opening of another grab-and-go this winter has decreased the amount of food waste will most likely be determined after results are collected from a survey set to go out this spring.

Overflowing trays could also be caused because students are trying to eat their money’s worth of food at the dining halls. A majority of students swipe their OU identification cards to pay for meals when they enter dining halls; students never have to know just how much money each meal would cost if it were paid for in cash. Rumors circulated last academic year that if one paid in cash to go to dinner at Shively, the receipt would read $12. Whether or not that figure is correct is irrelevant because the result is the same; students were sent into frenzy and began trying to eat more food. For this reason, reducing meal plan prices would most likely lead many students to take less food.

Regardless of the many shortcomings of the amount of food waste generated at Ohio University dining locations and the trials done to overcome them, the root of the problem lies in students being misinformed. Sykes says that “an education night” was held. Sonia Marcus, OU Sustainability Coordinator at the time the 2008 waste audits were held, said at the time that education of students did not “necessarily draw action” (“Food Waste Audits”). Yet, the extent of the education was a display of signs and charts with information collected from the audits held, according to the Office of Sustainability’s website.

More education nights should be held and they should be more informational. Students need to know what exactly is going on – they need to know that the food they are putting on their trays and then choosing to discard is not being composted (unless they are eating at Shively or Baker). Right now, there are students who believe that everything they put in a bin labeled “Compost” is making it to OU’s compost site. Whether or not those students’ waste ends up there is a coin toss. Students would make more calculated decisions at on-campus dining locations if they knew the consequences of their choices to waste food.

Work's Cited

“Food Waste Audits.” Office of Sustainability. Ohio University, 2011. Web. 24 Feb.
2011.

Marvin, Stephanie. Personal Interview. 22 Feb. 2011.

Sykes, Erin. Personal Interview. 22 Feb. 2011.

“The Composting Project at Ohio University.” Ohio Sustainability. Ohio University,
2010. Web. 22 Feb. 2011.



("The Composting Project at Ohio University." Ohio University Sustainability website.)