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Students, faculty and staff dining in the Michigan League can skip the trash cans and choose to compost food waste as part of a pilot program exploring post-consumer food composting on campus.
Led by the Waste Reduction and Recycling Office, the pilot program measures the amount of post-consumer composting occurring in several restaurants including: Beansters, Wendy’s, Taco Bell and University Catering. The program began at the start of fall semester and ends Nov. 21.
“We are exploring post-consumer composting for a number of reasons,” says Tracy Artley, sustainability program coordinator with Plant Building and Grounds Services. “Most importantly, the pilot is in response to student inquiry to see if it’s feasible on our campus — to determine the challenges we would face in rolling out campuswide — as well the true financial costs.”
Post-consumer composting involves collecting leftover food after it has reached the consumer. Offering people on campus the opportunity to compost leftovers is another effort supporting the university’s goal to reduce waste sent to landfills by 40 percent.
While the pilot marks the first time post-consumer food composting has been implemented institutionally on campus, the university has participated in pre-consumer composting since 1998 and has collected nearly 870 tons of waste.
Compost collection container along side a trash receptacle with signs indicating accepted items for each in the Michigan League. Photo courtesy Tracy Artley.
As part of the pilot, restaurant customers can find compost collection containers alongside trashcans in each of the participating restaurant areas, with signage indicating accepted items.
University Catering staff is responsible for sorting collected food waste into the proper bins from events. Compostable items include any food leftovers plus non-food items that include napkins, toothpicks, tea bags made from a paper material without staples, wooden coffee stirrers and compostable cutlery.
Collected compost is picked up by Waste Management Services crews and taken to the City of Ann Arbor’s composting site, operated by WeCare Organics, a New York-based residual waste management company. The university is tracking the volume of post-consumer composting in conjunction with pre-consumer composting.
“We need to collect ‘real data’ to determine the feasibility of post-consumer composting,” said Robert Yecke, director of the Michigan League. “The League is a great location to collect that data as we have a variety of food areas within the facility.”
Commenting on the progress so far, Yecke added that employees have embraced the pilot, but there’s still a great deal of confusion among costumers as to what is trash, recyclable and compostable, indicating it will take time to educate people about proper sorting.
The pilot is a result of recommendations from a 2010 study to explore the feasibility for an on-campus, post-consumer food waste composting program, as well as student recommendations from the ENVRON 391: Sustainability and the Campus course.
