“Trash” has a new meaning at Churchill Road Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia. Some of it means money. Some of it means food for the hungry. And some of it means a bumper crop of vegetables this spring.

Churchill Road produces 300 pounds of waste in the cafeteria every day, but throws out only 30 pounds of trash—a reduction of 90%. Where did the waste go? We have redistributed 270 pounds through food donation, recycling, composting and upcycling (see Churchill Road’s waste reduction program in action on WUSA9 News).

Students have learned that nothing is disposable: everything has a value and you just don’t throw it away because you think its trash. After they finish eating, students walk through the “Waste Reduction Line,” separating their unopened foods, recycled items, and compostable fruits and vegetables. Through our program, we redistribute 270 pounds of cafeteria waste each day. These figures add up over the school year, when 51,300 lbs of waste is redistributed by:

• Rescuing 15,200 lbs of unopened food for local food banks
• Composting 15,200 lbs to supply soil for classroom gardens and
• Raised vegetable beds
• Recycling 13,300 lbs in accordance with FCPS requirements to reduce landfills
• Upcycling 7,600 lbs of foil-lined bags through TerraCycle, raising over $2,000

Churchill Road is proud of its Environment-Based Education Program and the connections we make with our students. More than 50 public and private schools have visited Churchill Road to learn from us, hoping to incorporate their own version of a waste reduction program at their schools. We advise these schools to start small and build a strong foundation. The easiest place to start is with food rescue. Food rescue consists of collecting unopened dairy and other food products and then refrigerating or storing the items for weekly deliveries to local food banks. The food rescue aspect of our program strengthens Churchill Road’s strong belief in service learning, which is practiced every school day. It helps to make our students aware that we are an important part of a larger community. This in turn promotes parents’ and community leaders’ involvement in our program.

We have incorporated Environment-Based Education into the curriculum to expand and enhance the students’ ownership of learning with academic, hands-on involvement in the great outdoors. Always mindful of the educational components (including math, science, social studies, language arts, technology, art, etc.), this program helps our students become actively engaged in learning by allowing them to participate in real life situations. It helps students develop a passion and desire to learn. As Principal Don Hutzel states, “Using our environment as a tool for achieving a broader educational goal increases critical thinking skills and enhances leadership roles for our students. Our hope is to encourage lifelong learners and leaders.”

To learn more about environment-based education and how waste-reduction programs can help your school and students, visit the Eco-Schools site today. >>

Debra Maes is an Environmental Studies Educator at Churchill Road ES in McLean, Virginia. Also a parent, Debra saw a need to reduce the amount of waste produced every day in the school. Through Debra’s vision and guidance, the “Waste Reduction Line” was born. Debra’s ultimate goal? Zero waste. Can it be done? She thinks so!

Volunteers with the University of New Hampshire’s Trash 2 Treasure program have been rolling rugs and testing televisions all summer long in preparation for their second annual move-in weekend yard sale.  Throughout the month of May 2012, the T2T team collected furniture, clothing, electronics and more from various drop-off points around the UNH campus, and even made special pick-ups at off-campus apartments in the surrounding towns.  The items were cleaned and stored over the summer and will be displayed for sale at the start of the fall semester.

They estimate that the 2011 T2T cycle diverted 57,000 pounds of perfectly usable items from the waste stream, and expect the numbers to be even higher for the 2012 cycle .  T2T is a self-sustaining program; the money made at the yard sale goes toward the costs of storing and cleaning items and running the following year’s sale, and expanding their program’s specific model to other campuses.  The few leftover items are kept in the community—either donated to local churches for their fall sales or to local secondhand shops.  You can get a feel for the entire process from this video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Northeastern University also has a Trash 2 Treasure program, with item collection in the spring and a sale in the fall.  In a unique twist on engaging the student community, all student organizations that volunteer will receive a portion of the sale’s profits, proportional to the number of volunteer hours its members commit; everything else will go to a local charity.

At the University of Texas, the Campus Environmental Center’s T2T profits go toward campus environmental programming such as recycling and energy conservation initiatives.

This back to school season, consider ways to minimize your resource consumption—borrow items from friends and family, buy used, and if you have to buy new, keep your purchases local—it cuts down on fossil fuels used in production and transportation, and, according to a study by the Maine Center for Economic Policy (MECEP), for every $100 spent at a local, independent business, the additional benefit to the community is nearly double that of a purchase of the same amount at a chain.  Buying used usually eliminates the need for plastic and Styrofoam packaging (especially if you bring your own bag!), further eliminating waste.

Trash 2 Treasure programs keep usable items from unnecessarily filling limited landfill space, and prevent the use of fossil fuels in the production, packaging and shipping of new items.

Support your campus community, your home community, and our environment as a whole as you get back into the swing of things!  If your back-to-school list is all checked off, you can still help your local T2T sale by volunteering.  Can you think of any better way to kick off the year?!  And you never know what you’ll find…

Does your campus have a similar back-to-school yard sale?  Leave a comment to let us know!

Here are a few more sales that we know about, as featured in Generation E:  Students Leading for a Sustainble, Clean Energy Future:
• Ohio State Dump and Run
• Suffolk University Dump and Run

Georgia Institute of Technology - 2011 Case Study on Game Day Recycling

• Sharing campus efforts with colleges and universities nationwide;
• Published case studies will be shared with NWF’s campus contact list of more than 25,000 students, faculty and staff, plus our social media networks;
• Our database is a great resource to help campuses document their efforts; the database is searchable by topic, state, year and school and has more than 650 case studies!
• National press release promoting the 2012 case studies.

Each year NWF’s Campus Ecology program publishes case studies contributed by its members and partners showcasing their campus sustainability practices and global warming solutions for the past school year (2011-2012). NWF will release these illustrated reports in Fall 2012 in our online, searchable case study database, one of our most popular resources. Colleges and universities throughout the U.S. have made great strides toward addressing global warming and protecting wildlife and habitat. We invite you to share your success stories and let other campuses learn from you!

Click here to review the case study guidelines and use our template to get started.

Schools are welcome to submit more than one case study on multiple projects in different areas of sustainability and green workforce development. Case studies can focus on completed projects/programs or projects still in development.

Contact Campus Ecology with any questions:
campus@nwf.org
703-438-6000
www.CampusEcology.org

We have the power to impact the planet

This April 21st, the Ian Somerhalder Foundation challenges colleges and universities in California to get dirty! The Foundation aims to join more than 2000 schools, including colleges and universities, in a statewide effort to clean up local communities throughout California on Saturday, April 21st, 2012.

Clean-up your campus on April 21st! REGISTER TODAY! We have the power to impact the planet and clean-up California.

To learn more about efforts to green your campus and community in California and throughout the U.S. please go to NWF’s Campus Ecology website.

Ian Somerhalder plays “Damon” on the CW’s Vampire Diaries;  his Foundation aims to empower, educate and collaborate with people and projects to positively impact the planet and its creatures.

The hope is that this movement will prevent students from being able to fill their trays with food that would end up uneaten and thrown in the garbage. Ideally, not only will trayless dining reduce wasted food, but energy and water will be saved by not having to wash trays.

According to Jonathan Bloom, journalist and creator of Wasted Food, there are over 30 colleges and universities that offered trayless dining halls, or have at least tried it, in the last year. Bloom’s list includes schools ranging from Luther College in Iowa (2,500 students) to the University of Florida (51,000 students and the second-largest university in the country).

“I think traylessness is a real no-brainer,” says Bloom. “It requires little to no extra money and not much of a change in the student’s lifestyle. All it asks is that students make two trips to get food instead of one.”

In the United States, more than 25% of food produced for consumption goes to waste, and food leftovers are the largest component, by weight, of the waste stream in the United States. As food decomposes in landfills, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. In fact, landfills are the largest human-related source of methane in the United States and responsible for 34% of methane emissions overall.

Although trayless dining is a relatively new concept, one landmark study on the effort, produced by ARAMARK Higher Education, was released in July 2008. The study examined 186,000 meals at 25 colleges and universities and found that on trayless dining days, food waste was reduced by 25% to 30% per person, or about one-quarter to one-half pound of food per person per day.

The study also sought to identify the water and energy savings resulting from removing trays from dining halls, although found it difficult to generalize the water consumption savings due to the high number of variables, such as dishwashing systems and water-flow rates. ARAMARK did determine, however, that washing one tray requires at least one-third to one-half gallon of water. In a recent Boston Globe article, the University of Florida estimates that it will save 470,000 gallons of water annually through trayless dining.

The ARAMARK study could not confidently determine energy consumption and cost savings due to an even greater number of variables, such as regional and local utility rates, institutional fuel mix and operating practices. However, the study did highlight case studies for two specific universities, the University of Maine at Farmington and Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. The University of Maine estimated saving $57,000 a year with trayless dining, while Grand Valley State University estimated an economic savings of $79,000 and a 540-pound reduction in dish detergent and sanitizer waste.

It may appear that trayless dining is a “golden egg” in food, energy and water reduction, but it has been met with some student resistance. “There are a couple of arguments I’ve heard against trayless dining,” says Bloom. “It’s the ‘I paid for this so I should be able to take as much as I want’ argument and ‘If the university is going to save a bunch of money on this program, why won’t I see any of it?’” In response to the first argument, Bloom chuckles because “students can still take as much food as they want. They just have to do it in a couple trips.”

The argument for what to do with the perceived saved money is trickier to solve. “I don’t think universities will lower their food prices for students,” says Bloom, “but they might invest the money into buying more locally-produced foods.” As the cost of dining out is 4% higher than one year ago, finding ways for universities to save money on food may just mean slowing the rise in costs passed down to students.

Still, students have found ways to show their disgust and frustration with trayless dining. A Wall Street Journal report  found that students at Colby College in Maine resorted to using their chairs as improvised trays on trayless dining days, and the school’s “woodsmen team” made the effort to craft their own wooden trays to use.

At Luther College in Iowa, food waste was reduced by 8.4% during a week-long trial of trayless dining. However, many students voiced their concerns over the credibility, mission and practice of the program. Luther College Dining Services provided comment cards to the students during the trial to gauge their receptivity. Some of the negative comments read, “This is freaking stupid,” and “I will burn a tire for every day I didn’t have a tray.” Some students purposely dumped food on the floors for the kitchen staff to clean up. About a week after the trial period ended, the college hosted an open forum to discuss trayless dining and its future on campus, but only about 25 students were present and most already favored removing trays. College officials thought the low forum attendance reflected that students had already begun to accept the idea of trayless dining.

Some students find it legitimately difficult to balance their meals, especially bowls of soup, in their arms. And some concerns have been raised over food safety when students have to leave their food unattended on the table to go back for a drink.

Even with the occasional instances of deliberate waste, dirty tables and disgruntled diners, the ARAMARK study found that a large majority of students across the United States favor trayless dining. In the study, ARAMARK surveyed more than 92,000 students, faculty and staff at 300 institutions in the United States (most of which have never even tried trayless dining), and they found that 79% of respondents indicate “Yes” when asked if “they would accept the removal of trays in an effort to reduce waste on campus.” ARAMARK also estimates that 50 to 60% of its 500 campus partners are expected to try the trayless dining program in the 2008-2009 academic year.

At Virginia Tech, the trayless program eventually created a full-time job for one student. In 2007, Andy Sarjahani was a student at Virginia Tech working on his dietetic internship. For his final project before graduation, he designed a study that looked at food waste in one of the campus dining halls. “There are 11 dining halls on campus,” says Sarjahani, “and two of them are ‘all you can eat.’ I chose to study one of them, D2, since it was the largest, serving over 2,500 students a day.” For a week, Sarjahani and other volunteers measured food waste when students used trays. “We found an average of 1,200 pounds of food being wasted a day at D2, 41% from ‘over-production’ and 59% from student waste.”

When Sarjahani conducted another food audit several weeks later, this time during a trayless dining week, he found that food waste was reduced by 29.6%, even though the average number of students being served went up to 2,800 a day.

After Sarjahani graduated, Virginia Tech hired him as the campus Sustainability Coordinator. Today, both of the university’s “all you can eat” dining halls are trayless all year, but interestingly, that doesn’t fully satisfy Sarjahani.

“It’s borderline greenwashing,” says Sarjahani. “Traylessness is a step in the right direction, but trays aren’t the problem. The problem is ‘all you can eat.’” Sarjahani looks at the 41% of food waste from over-production (down to 38% during the test trayless week) as the real culprit. “Why are they producing so much food?” he asks. “It’s because of a flawed rating system.”

Sarjahani is referencing Virginia Tech’s high rating in “Best Campus Food” by the Princeton Review (#3 in 2009). “The rating is based on quality, quantity and service,” Sarjahani explains, “but they don’t look at waste. The dining hall will make a new large pepperoni pizza 10 minutes before lunch ends, even if there’s three pieces left of another, just in case one student walks in looking for hot pepperoni pizza. The idea is that the last person in line should have the same food options as the first person in line.”

With so many universities and colleges expected to implement trayless dining options, questions like the one Sarjahani raises may work their way to the forefront, but the evidence is already showing that trayless dining halls are reducing waste and saving money, energy and water. ARAMARK suggests that universities interested in testing a trayless dining program launch a trial day or week during periods of heightened environmental awareness, such as Earth Week in April or Campus Sustainability Day in October. If a university wants to implement a full-time trayless dining hall, ARAMARK suggests starting it at the beginning of fall semester, when first-year students and transfers are most likely to immediately accept the idea since they have no previous experience with trays on campus.

See More:

US Wastes Half Its Food: Food Navigator

Students Take a Crash Course in Trayless Dining 101: Minneapolis Star Tribune

More College Cafeterias Dump Food Trays: USA Today

Dining Halls Go Trayless: Collegiate Times