The Lawrentian

Issue date: 2/5/10 Section: Features

Media Credit: lindsay hayward Greenfire will sponsor events throughout the year to promote food-waste awareness.

Last Wednesday and Saturday I found myself wearing plastic gloves, an attractive opaque apron, a thin film of dinner and a smile, attempting to summarize the mission of Greenfire and briefly outline key reasons for waste reduction while balancing plates and scraping leftovers into buckets.
Performing this activity clarified items to avoid for my own meal, and how quickly small instances of waste, when multiplied many times, become a significant problem.
I scraped for Greenfire's annual Clean Plate Challenge, a waste-awareness campaign lasting from Monday, Jan. 25 to Sunday, Jan. 31 during the hours of 5-8 p.m. in Andrew Commons.
Members of the campus environmental group Greenfire collected students' plates and scraped waste into three different buckets: inedibles - napkins, rinds, cores and bones - food waste and liquid waste. We measured total waste in pounds.
Over the week, diners discarded 1,151 pounds of consumable waste. The most wasteful night was Monday with 195 pounds of consumable waste, and the least wasteful night was Saturday, with 141 pounds. 35 pounds of napkins were thrown away Wednesday and Thursday nights, and 97 pounds of beverages were discarded Friday.
In previous years, the Clean Plate Challenge was exclusively orchestrated by Greenfire, but this year, it teamed up with Bon Appétit, which is currently involved in a national food waste reduction campaign. Greenfire decided to align the two events. However, aside from Bon Appétit's support and advertisements, the bulk of the effort still came from students.
The objective of the Clean Plate Challenge is to raise awareness about food waste. Greenfire does try to quantify the amount of food waste and to compare this data to previous years, but because this is only a secondary objective, the results can be statistically problematic.
For example, many students wondered why Greenfire advertised the Clean Plate Challenge, and why it scraped out front. Because of this visibility, the numbers may not accurately reflect the waste generated on most nights, when pressure to reduce waste may not be as acute.
However, despite these problems, it appears as though this year compares favorably to years past. In a 2008 Clean Plate Challenge, nearly 500 students eating at Jason Downer Commons between 5 and 7 p.m. discarded 80 pounds of food waste and four gallons of beverages.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools