Weigh the Waste!

The Office of Sustainability is partnering with Dining Services and Connected Communities to raise awareness about food waste. We started by weighing food waste at Marquis and Upper Dining Halls during the week of March 27, 2017. Over 20 volunteers from Connected Communities, LEAP, the Office of Sustainability and other groups assisted students in scraping food waste from plates and weighting the waste after four meals.

On average each person had about 0.2 pounds of food waste per meal. That’s about a quarter pound of food waste per person. The equivalent of a burger or a chicken tender.

Overall we wasted on average 78 pounds of food waste at each meal. Using Feeding America’s conversion rate of 1.25 pounds of food per meal, we could have fed 62 more people with our wasted food.

During Earth Week we’ll again Weigh the Waste to see if we can be less wasteful. To help us in this endeavor, Dining Services will put out tasting spoons, so that we can be make more informed decisions about how much food to take.