Dining services on campus has expanded greatly over the years. The most recent addition to the dining options is located in the Foisie Innovation Building. Planet Smoothie and Auntie Anne’s have made their way on campus, creating a hot topic among WPI community members.
With the dining expansions, there has also been a growth of “green” initiatives to make the dining services more environmentally sustainable and conscientious. Although there have been many improvements to the sustainability practices on campus, there is evident room for growth. One example of this is in regards to the cups at Planet Smoothie. When they first arrived on campus in A-term, the company was using styrofoam cups to serve customers. Styrofoam is an identified harmful material to the environment and the use of this product upset many students. To move toward a more sustainable practice, one student, Rachel Peterson, helped start a petition to abolish the use of styrofoam by Planet Smoothie. This petition quickly filled with signatures and by the day after submitting the petition, the company had switched to plastic cups.
“Although it seems like a victory from the petition, Chart Wells was very angry and mad at the students for speaking out against them. They said that they had something in the works, but I think that the petition helped move them along,” said Peterson. There was a lot of pushback from the university toward this approach, but their argument seemed invalid since the movement only aided an already planned course of action. This resistance and counteractive response from the university is evident in other regards as well.
Dunkin Donuts in the campus center has been around much longer than Planet Smoothie. Yet, no one has petitioned for their riddance of styrofoam cups and the university has done nothing to change the use of them.
During A term, the campus center food court replaced the plastic utensil dispensers with individually wrapped plastic utensils. Each utensil is now wrapped in a plastic bag which has created a significant amount of increased plastic waste. Although dining services has informed the Student Government Association that this is a temporary fix while the dispensers are being replaced, the individually wrapped utensils are still in place. This is outlasting the original timeline discussed between SGA and dining services. It also points to a counteraction to the other sustainable practices recently set in place on campus.
These inconsistencies with the university’s approach to sustainability demand other approaches to aid the green movement. They require the continued attention of campus community members.
In order to create an effective change, campus-wide, the community needs to be informed and made aware of the lack of green practices and the progress that has been made so far. Ignorance of the initiatives on campus is evident in the Pulse on Dining. There, the excess food waste is composted and donated to a local farm to provide food to animals. Although this is an active initiative that most students participate in when eating at the dining hall, awareness of this initiative is lacking. Many students are unaware of what happens to the food waste they contribute to on a daily basis.
In order to help spread awareness of this initiative and many others, the Green Team on campus often table sits and conducts surveys with incentives outside the dining hall. Being one of the driving forces behind these sustainable dining initiatives, the Green Team is very passionate and active in progressing the way dining is conducted on campus. One of the other recent initiatives they have contributed to is the reusable containers in the campus center food court which allows students to rent a tupperware as an alternative to the plastic takeaway containers for food on campus. After using the container, they can exchange it for a clean one for their next intended use. While this eliminates some plastic use on campus, there is still an abundance of unnecessary plastic regarding dining services.
To create a fully sustainable dining collaboration on campus, there needs to be a uniform movement. The university, clubs, dining services, and outside vendors must work collaboratively to prevent unintentional additions to the waste created. Together, the minimization of waste and the maximization of sustainability can be achieved.
