July 24, 2008
Saving the world, one composted cup at a time
Quick quiz: It’s hot out and you’ve bought a cool drink at a UW campus café. Can you compost that clear plastic-like cup?
The answer’s yes — Housing and Food Services (HFS) is now using compostable cups in all of its campus cafés and restaurants. Coffee cups, too. Even most of the straws are compostable, though the lids still need to go in the garbage.
Here’s another: How much of the UW’s food-related waste and recycling could we save from the landfills if we had 100 percent participation in recycling and composting at food service locations across campus?
The answer is a whopping 95, according to Michael Meyering, HFS project manager, who oversees composting efforts for the department. Sure, 100 percent participation is utopian and, well, impossible — but composting, combined with recycling, can still dramatically reduce the UW waste stream.
The gathering of food waste from kitchens, called pre-consumer collection, has been under way in HFS-run establishments since 2004. Last year, HFS brought composting out front, too, enabling customers to compost food-tainted paper plates, cups, napkins and stir sticks.
Now, all the cafes and restaurants overseen by HFS have composting in back and out front, for customers. But the challenge continues in getting people to take up the new habit.
The UW sends its compost to Cedar Grove Recycling in Everett, where over a 60-day process the food scraps and yard waste are turned into nutrient-rich compost, mulch and other products.
“We’re striving for zero waste,” Meyering said, “but in order to get there we need to do more outreach and do more education with customers, so we can get better participation. We’re the only one in town that’s doing this at this level — it really isn’t into our society yet.”
It’s coming on quickly, though. King County already allows meat and dairy products in yard waste containers, and the City of Seattle will follow suit in 2009.
And as with most signs of progress, students are helping to lead the way. Meyering said incoming freshmen have floor meetings in their residence halls about recycling and composting, and that the student group Students Expressing Environmental Dedication (SEED) remains extremely active and committed to the effort. HFS also publishes a newsletter called buzzworthy, which addresses matters of sustainability and goes out to students.
The numbers tell the tale of campus composting catching on. Back in January of 2007 the combined restaurants and cafés overseen by HFS sent a total of nine tons of compost to Cedar Grove. Just a bit over a year later, in May of 2008, that monthly total had increased sixfold to 55 tons.
“And it’ll just keep going up and up as we expand our product line and get more participation from customers,” Meyering said. He estimates about 50 percent participation so far.
Meyering’s Lander Hall office is a virtual museum of those products, from cups and stir-sticks to the still-evolving line of compostable cutlery that will likely be updated come fall. He’s proud, also, of the award his department won recently from the Washington State Recyclers Association for Recycler of the Year 2008 in the Institutions of Higher Education category.
HFS began using compostable cutlery made from corn last year but the utensils, still in use, are vulnerable to heat and tend to droop a bit when used on hot food. Meyering said a sturdier model of biodegradable cutlery — able to withstand about 20 more degrees of heat — has been approved by Cedar Grove and additional cutlery with even better performance characteristics is being tested now. In the fall, he said, HFS will seek the input of faculty, staff and students to determine if the older or newer versions are preferred.
If noncompostable items get included in the compost sent to Cedar Grove, Meyering said, the staff lets him know. “They will actually send me a picture (of the offending item) in e-mail,” he said. “They sent me a picture a couple of months ago of some aluminum foil that got into the composting” after a campus restaurant had sold gyros wrapped in foil. “I went to the unit and talked to them about how we can prevent this from happening again.”
Composting is not restricted to HFS-run establishments on campus; it’s also catching on at the UW Medical Center, which serves about 1,000 meals to hospital patients and 4,000 to 5,000 retail meals through its Plaza Café, Espresso/Sandwich Deli and catering services.
Walter Thurnhofer, UWMC’s food and nutrition services director, wrote in an e-mail, “We have been working with Cedar Grove Composting for a couple of years, sending them a variety of things from behind the scenes in the kitchen such as coffee grounds, some limited compostable paper products and a small amount of food waste.” He said there was a “significant increase in the volume and variety” of the material being sent for composting.
He also wrote, “We are currently in the process of evaluating compostable service ware — plates, bowls, flatware, straws, etc. — from our suppliers and expect to be offering full-scale compostable ware to all our retail customers in the next few months.”
Over at UW Bothell, they compost with worms, which is called vermicomposting. Bernard Harvey of the physical plant says both the Subway restaurant and the small espresso café on campus save food scraps for the composting effort, as does the café at Cascadia Community College, alongside UW Bothell.
Meyering said HFS also is encouraging manufacturers and producers to change their packaging to compostable material.
“It’d be great one day to be able to buy a bag of chips, finish eating them and then go ahead and compost the bag,” he said.
