(Back to front) Chris Evans, April Li and Heather Rensvold sort through waste from the EMU, separating trash from recyclable items. Their project will provide EMU Food Services with information to help reduce waste and
Senior Jessica Rose doesn’t particularly like trash. But when the environmental studies major signed up to help sort garbage from the EMU, she figured she could handle it.
Toward the end of the week, though, the project was starting to wear on her. It wasn’t so much the smell. Rather, it was the texture of used coffee grinds and half-eaten sandwiches. Pretty soon, Rose was working to choke back the vomit.
“When your hands are in it, it’s cold and mushy,” Rose said. “Anything that is wet and soggy is not fun to handle.”
Rose, along with a handful of students, donned jumpsuits and rubber gloves last week and sorted through 856 pounds of smelly food scraps, loose coffee grounds and dirty napkins as part of a waste audit of EMU Food Services. Students collected the garbage from the EMU dining area during and just after the lunch rush. Afterward, they separated it into categories based on whether the trash could be composted or recycled or had to be thrown out.
Project supervisor and environmental studies graduate teaching fellow Mike Sims said the waste audit is a component of a larger study being conducted by the Environmental Studies Service Learning Program. The waste audit will provide information to help EMU Food Services reduce what goes to the dump, Sims added.
“We hope to produce a waste profile that will provide information about what exactly goes in the Dumpster, and where we can suggest strategies to reduce or recover stuff that does not have to go into the trash,” he said.
A goal of the project, Sims said, is to educate people on how to reduce waste and divert it from the landfill. To reduce waste, EMU Food Services could provide reusable mugs, plates and cups or begin a composting program, he added.
“Food waste, coffee grounds and
anything made of paper can be
composted,” Sims said. “This has been a hugely labor intensive process; we’ve been sorting waste (from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.) every day for a week.”
About 3,500 EMU Food Services customers produce 700 pounds of garbage and 530 pounds of recyclable materials a day. Preliminary results from the waste audit indicated nearly 40 percent of the collected waste could have been composted, while non-recoverable plastic utensils and drink cups made up more than 26 percent of the trash.
Students conducting the project plan to interview EMU food vendors and customers to find ways to enhance waste reduction efforts.
Service Learning Program Coordinator Steve Mital said the program provides undergraduate environmental studies students the opportunity to tackle real world environmental problems. Mital said the program was started to give students skills that will help them find jobs after graduation.
“The Service Learning Program is basically a small environmental consulting agency,” Mital said. “These students get a glimpse into the professional world of environmental waste.”
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