Students back minus dining trays

A student-led initiative at the University of Virginia is taking the trays out of the school’s dining halls.
Scrapping the trays — effective this fall — is meant to reduce trash and conserve water. But it’s also something students and Aramark, the company that oversees
UVa’s dining services, are adding to their ever-lengthening list of ways that university stomachs and environmental sustainability connect.

Kendall Singleton helped spearhead an effort in spring 2006 that put her and other like-minded students near dining hall trashcans for one day each month for three months. Their goal was to collect the waste coming off trays.
The first time the volunteers did a “waste audit” they staked out the dining hall that serves 50 percent of school’s meals — Observatory Hill, the busiest of three main halls. In a one-day tally there were 880 pounds of trash heading for a landfill, Singleton said.

That led to talks between Aramark and students about taking the trays out altogether. The line of thinking was that diners who use trays often fall victim to going-to-the-grocery-store-hungry syndrome. And that more trash is generated when people can heap food on trays instead of carrying dishes.
But while the 2006 waste audits were met with curiosity by diners, Singleton said students didn’t like when “Trayless Tuesdays” showed up earlier this year.

“Maybe there should have been more of an emphasis on ‘Maybe you should abstain from using one,’” said Singleton, who graduated in May. “It definitely backfired on us.”
Despite that, Singleton and Aramark district manager Brent Beringer both cite a survey this spring that showed 86 percent of diners were willing to go trayless.
Beringer also notes the water use in dining halls could be cut by as much as 35 percent this school year because the more than 60,000 meals served university-wide each week will be trayless. (Trays are still available for diners with special needs.)
On an annual basis, that breaks down to roughly a million out-of-work trays, Beringer said.
“It’s really something that interested people that were concerned about the waste,” said Will Eden, who serves on the Student Council’s sustainability committee that works on “green dining” initiatives.

‘Change is hard’

Taking a closer look at the dining hall trash has also to led to talks with an Albemarle County farm that is interested in composting the waste, said Cheryl Gomez, UVa’s energy and utilities director.
“There will be some students who have a problem with it, undoubtedly,” Beringer said. “Change is hard for everyone.”

Regardless, Beringer calls the move part of “the future of things” for the university, Aramark and dining halls in general.
In the last two-and-a-half years Beringer said he’s been consumed with learning a new language that talks of eating as organically and locally as possible.
And it’s that language, and a dialogue with student-led environmental-advocacy groups, that’s led to the “sustainable dining practices” model that Beringer describes as a work-in-progress for the future of UVa dining.

Dining, not eating, green

The model aims to bring food to UVa that is local, organic, fairly traded, humanely raised and seasonal.
Beringer said before the plan was in place, in 2006, that the dining halls were naturally about 4 percent in compliance with the model’s goals. He said the goal for 2008 is 20 percent compliance and thinks that mark will be hit.
That 20 percent includes having, since 2006, replaced Styrofoam clamshell to-go containers with bio-friendly ones made of natural fibers.

It also includes losing Styrofoam cups for ones made of wax paper and looking at replacing plastic flatware with utensils made of potato starch, Beringer said.
And while using no trays saves money on water and electricity, making the move away from Styrofoam will cost an estimated $50,000 more this year, Beringer said.
And he’s fine with that.
“What I’m hearing with a lot of my peers is that they’re waiting until it’s perfect,” Beringer said of environmentally sustainable dining. “Let’s do what we can now ... if it’s 10 percent or 20 percent.”