Last week, Houghton College’s Eco Reps partnered with Sodexo to bring awareness to food waste on campus. For the last two years, Sodexo has joined with Houghton College’s Eco Reps for a week of focusing on reducing food waste, as well as general waste. Throughout the week, Sodexo and Eco Reps offer visual demonstrations and challenges for students and faculty to reveal patterns of waste and develop habits to decrease them.
Brian Webb, the faculty advisor for Eco Reps, emphasized the role of Waste Less Week in the way the campus approaches waste. “No one’s going to argue we should waste more,” he said. Rather, since the aim is always to reduce waste, he hopes to “create an opportunity for students to intentionally focus on it.” Webb said he hoped“that by participating [in Waste Less Week] for a specific period of time people will adopt a different mindset or new habit.”
One such opportunity of intentional focus is Sodexo’s weighing visual for food waste in the dining hall. Rather than simply placing plates with leftover food on the conveyor belt to be taken care of in the dish room, students presented their food waste to Eco Reps volunteers, who scraped the waste into buckets and weighed them at the end of the night. The visual was used last year, although making a direct comparison is difficult, as waste this year was only measured from an hour and a half of dinner instead of the entire meal. Nonetheless, Eco Reps intern Gabrielle Sheeley ‘19 noted lower numbers for this year’s waste. According to Sodexo sustainability intern Daniel Bellerose ‘17, “In an hour and a half of meal time, there were 47.25 pounds of food waste.” This projects to “as much as 70 pounds,” Sheeley explained, which compares favorably with last year’s 81 pounds of waste.
In addition to Sodexo’s visual of food waste, students had another opportunity to intentionally focus on waste in their daily lives. Houghton’s Eco Reps proposed the Waste Less challenge, which challenged participants to create zero waste. “We really wanted something that would make students more aware of their choices,” Sheeley said. She said that while last year’s challenge for participants to carry with them the waste they made was a “nice visual,” there were difficulties with taking trash into areas like classrooms. While she says that this year continues “the goal of zero waste,” it operates on an “honor system,”.
The challenge ended with “cookies and celebration” for all those who pledged said Webb, along with along with himself and the Eco Reps club. In keeping with “intentional focus,” Sheeley noted that while “no one said they were able to accomplish absolutely zero waste,” the challenge nonetheless left an impression. “Most people seemed to pick one or two things to work on or to have zero waste from during the week, such as not wasting any food or not using any paper towels,” she said. She cited the challenge’s impact on her own life. “It’s something that definitely takes effort,” she said. “Everything is set up to be convenient and disposable.” Christina Mulligan ‘17, a participant in the challenge, said “In general, I don’t waste very much. It was a challenge to cut down even more, but I also liked having the opportunity to become more aware of how much I do throw out.”
Sheeley said the challenge appeared successful, with 123 people signed up to participate. “It’s probably the best participation we’ve ever had in an Eco Reps event,” Webb said.