Eliminating dining hall waste

Penn Dining has launched its Scrape Bucket Campaign — a five-day challenge to track and reduce food waste in Penn dining halls.

From Monday until Friday, diners in all Penn dining halls will be asked to dump their excess food into measuring buckets. Members of the Penn Environmental Group and Penn Eco-Reps are volunteering to direct the diners.

The goal of the campaign, which was launched nationally in Bon Appetit Cafes, is to visually convey the power of food waste, according to Director of Residential Dining Theresa Varvir.

“Twenty percent of all landfill waste is food waste,” Varvir explained, “so making better decisions about what we’re putting on our plates can help to reduce that.”

Penn Dining will record the daily results on a poster in each dining hall, Kings Court Chef Manager Lydia Kumpa said. The aim, she added, is to reduce the total amount of food waste as the week progresses.

In addition to reducing waste those involved hope to see increased participation and interest, Student Eco-Reps Coordinator Julian Goresko said. However, he volunteered during lunch at Hill College House on Monday and added “we really didn’t miss anyone. Maybe one or two out of 100 walked by that we missed. The numbers could actually be pretty steady.”

Though the Scrape Bucket Campaign took place on other campuses three weeks ago, at Penn it was planned to coincide with several of the University’s other sustainability efforts, Varvir added.

The waste collected during the week will count towards Penn’s waste minimization figures for the national RecycleMania competition, Business Services Spokeswoman Barbara Lea-Kruger explained.

Moreover, the accumulated excess food — not only this week, but from now on — will be composted as part of the University’s newly-unveiled food composting initiative, she added.

“We’ve been working hard on a composting program for a while now,” Lea-Kruger said.

With the launch of the composting program, Kumpa noted, kitchen staff members — as well as students — have become more cognizant of sustainability issues.

“They’re asking, ‘Can we cut that melon a little bit closer?’” she said of the behind-the-scenes Bon Appetit team. “Everyone is just making better choices.”

All of these efforts, Lea-Kruger continued, will culminate with a “big splash on Earth Day to talk about what we’ve done.”

For the rest of this week, though, students and administrators will remain focused on the Scrape Bucket Challenge.

PEG Publicity Chair Anna Caffry, a College sophomore, said she is thrilled with both Scrape Bucket and the new composting program, as composting has been an important PEG goal.

“We may not always think about it like this, but food is just another [type of waste] we can reduce. So it’s great, through the campaign, that we’re bringing attention to not creating waste,” she said.

Sebastian Rowland, a College sophomore who volunteered at Kings Court on Monday, agreed that preventing waste is valuable.

“A little bit of broccoli doesn’t mean a lot.” he said, “but a whole field of broccoli, which we could potentially be throwing away, is meaningful.”

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