Cafeteria trays are becoming a thing of the past in colleges and universities across the country as administrators seek to cut costs incurred by wasted food and water. College students tend to have eyes bigger than their stomachs and pile tons of food onto their trays, throwing away much of it once they’re full. Then, there’s all the water required to wash the trays themselves.
From The New York Times:
The Sustainable Endowments Institute, a research organization that tracks environmental practices at the 300 colleges and universities with the largest endowments, said that 126 of them had curtailed use of trays, some of them banishing trays only from certain dining halls, and some introducing, for example, “trayless Tuesdays.” Such moves are often part of a larger push to embrace environmentalism that includes hiring sustainability coordinators, introducing solar panels, composting dining-hall waste and encouraging students to turn off lights with catchy sayings like “Do It in the Dark.”
“The trend has definitely taken off,” said Mark Orlowski, executive director of the institute, which this fall plans to add a question about trayless cafeterias to an annual survey that includes other dining-related topics like vegan entrees, biodegradable containers and community gardens. “It reduces not just waste, but energy and water consumption. Over all, it’s been very successful.”
So, how are students responding to it? As it turns out, many of them don’t mind at all, saying it makes the college dining hall feel more ‘homey’. It’s the faculty that has pushed back, with some schools – like Cornell – reporting that administrators received angry emails from professors about how “ridiculous” the policy is.
Despite the complaints from the dinosaurs, this is really a smart idea, considering how many thousands of times those trays would need to be washed every year. Think of all the water that could be saved over a period of a few years if even a fraction of America’s colleges and universities ditched the trays.
Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Oscar Durand for The New York Times
