A month ago, I wrote a post about college food waste. After more research, it’s worth taking a closer look. Thanks to RecycleMania, a college recycling contest that has a food waste category, we have access to some interesting numbers.
In the aforementioned Food Service Organics category, Rutgers University leads the list by with a three-week total of 79.05 pounds of food per person per week. That means the average Rutgers student or staff member throws out 26 pounds of food per week or about 1.25 pounds at every meal.Â
Think about that for a second. I’m no mathematician, but that’s the same as the “beef” of five McDonald’s Quarter Pounders at every meal.
Dianne Gravatt, Rutgers Director of Environmental Services, said that their numbers are much higher than other competitors’ because they mistakenly used the food waste’s weight before they deliquified it. Many schools use Somat machines or “pulpers” to remove 75 to 80 percent of the water content, the real culprit in food waste’s heavyness. After Rutgers corrects its data, “We’re still going to be number one, but we’re not gonna be that high,” Gravatt said.
Well…Rutgers’ totals may go down if they report their pulped food weight, but unfortunately, the amount students waste seems accurate. To verify these numbers, I spoke with the Jim Verner, the guy who oversees the recycling of Rutgers’ food waste. Verner, facilities supervisor for the Division of Dining Services, said that last year a local pig farmer collected about 3,000 tons of (deliquified) food waste from the school.  If you add in the wet weight, convert to pounds and divide by the number of meal plan students, you get 33 pounds per person per week or more than one and a half pounds per person per meal.
Make that six Quarter Pounders.
To be fair, those numbers include inedible food preparation scraps. But they don’t include the food students discard when they eat takeout, which Verner says represents between 40 to 50 percent of all meals.
I should point out that Rutgers is on the right side of the food waste battle. While they may be squandering large amounts, at least they send their excess food to pig farmers (a win-win, since it costs them 50 percent less per ton than sending it to landfills). We have no reason to believe Rutgers wastes more or less than any other university, just that they’re better or more conscientious about recycling it. The reason we’re talking about them here is because they’re putting their numbers out there.
OK, fine–it’s also because their numbers are huge.
Comments
2 responses to “Campus Waste”
The NY Times (Sunday, April 1, 2007, CT Section page 3) picks up the Recycle Mania story, and tells the story that Harvard is beating Yale in recycling.
What’s amazing that a huge school – Univ. of Maryland – is recycling only 1.8 pounds of food per person this year.
Does that mean they are the best of cleaning their plates or they just don’t recycle? What’s the average food waste at a college?
Finally, kudos to my alma mater — Ohio University — for starting recycle maniacs in 2001. BTW, OU has nothing to do with Ohio State University, for those watching the game today.
Gosh, can’t believe it took The Times so long to get to the story! You can read their take on it, which discusses food recycling briefly on the second page.
I gave up on the Recyclemania’s food recycling category because the numbers seemed to fluctuate so much. Rutgers was the runaway leader at one point, but now they’ve stopped reporting their data.
A food recycling competition is tricky. It’s certainly better to have less food per student being recycled or thrown away. But the category seems to reward colleges that have a glut of tossed food to recycle. Then again, schools–like my alma mater Wesleyan–with a minute amount probably aren’t recycling much of the food that is wasted. That’s not a great thing, either.
As someone at Harvard recycling told me–this is probably a category where you want to be somewhere in the middle.
Finally, I agree: props to Ohio U for getting today’s college students thinking about recycling. Especially considering this from the Times article:
Guess there’s no time to recycle when you have Facebook and My Space profiles to update.