MaLane Harbour
Tameka Eldridge
Operation Dine and Dish
Project Report
The focus of our Environmental Science 202 class taught by Professor Alessa, was food. The class also had a community service component. We, MaLane Harbour and Tameka Eldridge, with the help of Paula Williams as our advisor, put together Operation Dine and Dish because of our interest in the impact of food waste on the environment. The purpose of the project was to figure out how much food gets wasted in the Cuddy Center over a specified period of time and also to bring awareness to the customers of the Cuddy Center about the effects of food waste on the environment and give alternatives to just throwing away food.
We decided that we wanted to have a visual display to attract the attention of people to get them asking questions. We figured out what types of print materials we wanted to use, then visited with the print shop on campus and with Service Business Printing to figure out who could give us better prices on the print materials. Because MaLane was able to get us a discount with Service Business Printing so that is whom we decided to go with. From there we were able to put together a budget that we used in our proposal to the sustainability council. Copies of the brochures and table tents produced for and used in this project are attached.
Funds provided by the Sustainability Committee were used to pay the printing fees for the brochures and table tents and to purchase clear bins in which students discarded their food during the project. We would like to thank the committee for its generosity.
We scheduled a meeting with Mr. Tim Doebler, the director of the Cuddy Center, to get approval for use of the Cuddy Center. We met with him and explained what we wanted to do and he enthusiastically gave his approval. While in the meeting with Mr. Doebler we found out what that busiest times in the Cuddy Center were 11:00 am – 3:00pm, this time would become the focus time period of our campaign. We decided to do two demonstrations one week just before the Thanksgiving break and two demonstrations just before the end of the semester, the thinking being that during these holiday periods people would be more conscious of how much food they are wasting.
We were able to recruit some of our fellow environmental science classmates to help us with this project and they were able to use the time as credit towards their volunteer time for the class. Our fellow students were asked to collect food as people were throwing away their trash and to pass out flyers and answer questions and give information to people. We scheduled meetings with our volunteers to let them know what would be required of them and also to give them some of the research that we had come up with about food waste, and give them some answers to questions that we anticipated that people might ask. KTUU came to campus and interviewed us for a story on their evening news about food waste. We worked at the Cuddy Center for Four Days total. Our findings were as follows:
Food Wasted In a four Hour period
18 November / 10.2 lbs19 November / 8.8 lbs
2 December / 8.2 lbs
3 December / 9.6 lbs
What we found was that although the Cuddy Center did produce some food waste most people were taking their food to go or they finished all their food so there wasn’t as much food waste as we thought there would be. One major thing we did notice was that there was a significant amount of waste that could be recycled in the form of cardboard, paper and plastics; also, the Cuddy Center uses a large amount of Styrofoam. We would recommend that the Cuddy Center look into ways to recycle and look for some alternative products to use instead of Styrofoam. Most of the students that we talked to were concerned about the cuddy center not recycling and their use of Styrofoam products. Many of the students that we talked to said that they had not really thought about how much food they wasted until we did this project, they also said that they would be more conscious of what they did with left over food.