Down with the plastic lunch tray!
Industry reports suggest that ditching the cafeteria mainstay may be one of the best ways to reduce food waste
Topics: Pacific Standard, Old Chapel, Occupy Wall Street, High School, University, Business News, News
When I was a sophomore in college, a near mutiny arose on campus after the administration announced that, forthwith, all plastic trays would be removed from our cafeterias. Not only did the trays encourage students to waste food, Old Chapel argued, but washing them all—in addition to the usual slew of plates, bowls, and flatware—consumed a needless amount of chemical detergent, hot water, and worker wages. (They also had a pesky habit of winding up on the sledding hill in winter.) This being rural Vermont, and with so little else to organize against—the Dow was above 14,000, Occupy Wall Street was a distant dream—we took our teenage entitlement and self-righteous anger out on poor Matthew Biette, the bow-tied director of college dining.
I thought of Biette the other day after spotting an item in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition. I wanted him to know that, all these years later, he’d been vindicated: according to researchers, traylessness reduces food waste among college students by nearly a third, and dish use by more than a quarter.
Industry reports from service providers like Sodexo and Aramark have suggested that ditching trays can reduce food waste by up to 25 percent. But their methodology is less than rigorous, so Kiho Kim and Stevia Morawski, of American University’s environmental studies department, decided to design an experiment of their own.
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