The How-To Guide to Composting

As you can imagine, all you can eat dining halls lead to a large amount of food waste. While trayless dining helps to reduce food waste by 25-30%, there were still 13.7 tons of food waste between September through November 2017 in Commons Dining Hall. When food waste is sent to decompose in landfills it reacts with metals to produce harmful greenhouse gasses. Don't worry, that food wasn't just thrown away, it was composted through Natural Upcycling. Natural Upcycling is an upstate food scrap collection company that takes food waste and turns it into a reusable resource. With every ton of food waste that is composted, 0.9 tons of CO2 emissions are saved. There are several benefits to composting and it's easy to do! Follow these quick tips below to start composting today!

What you will need:
1) Carbon-rich material (leaves, straw, dead flowers)
2) Nitrogen-rich material (grass clippings, vegetable peelings, fruit rinds)
3) Garden soil
4) Site that is at least 3x3ft

To start your own compost you'll need to layer the material above starting with the carbon-rich material, then nitrogen-rich, followed by soil. Make sure to moisten each of the layers and continue piling on until the pile is 3ft high. Every couple of weeks the material will need to be turned by taking a fork or shovel to move the stuff at the center to the outside and vice versa. The compost needs to stay moist to allow for proper decomposition. You can always add new material to the compost, which is a great way to use your food scraps and add to your compost pile.

The Environment Pays Less with Tray-less Dining

The Hospitality Services at Rensselaer does our best to reduce our carbon footprint and stay green at all our resident dining halls. One big improvement we've committed to in the past few years is the initiative to maintain a "trayless" dining environment.

The larger impact of trayless dining comes from the reduction in food waste. A recent study from Aramark revealed a 25-30% decreases in food waste during trayless days at 25 different colleges and universities. Students have a tendency to pack on the food when they have a tray that can carry multiple plates. With the absence of trays, students are lead to make more careful plate choices and therefore waste less food during meals.

Trayless dining is a simple and easy solution to reduce waste and save money. Not only have we made an effort to be trayless in resident dining, but we've recently pushed the initiative to our retails locations as well. Just this past semester The McNeil Room has gone trayless. While the food waste might not have been the biggest concern in our retail location, the energy and water saved from cleaning the trays make an environmental impact. Trayless dining conserves energy by eliminating the need run those trays through the dishwasher anytime they are used by patrons.