Campus Food Waste Needs To Be Reduced

By Khiyah Griffin

Despite many efforts put in place at Georgia Southern University to practice sustainability and be environmentally-friendly, food waste is still an ongoing problem in the Statesboro Dining Commons.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in 2014 an estimated 38 million tons of food was wasted in the United States. This amount includes 22 million pounds from U.S colleges.

Food waste occurs when edible food is discarded by consumers, and it happens for many reasons such as lack of education, planning meals properly, proper infrastructure, storing food until it spoils, natural calamities and more.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, food waste contributes to eight percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

Georgia Southern University’s eagle dining services outlines sustainability efforts on their website.

Those efforts include the use of pulpers,  the “tray-less” initiative, a reduction of disposable Styrofoam cups, plates and plastic and recycling used cooking oil and fryer grease through a partnership with Premiere Grease.

Despite these initiatives, the Dining Commons have recently been made aware of the specific amounts of food being wasted thanks to a recent study.

This year, three Georgia Southern University professors, Drs. Evans Afriyie-Gyawu, Padmini Shankar and Vinoth Sittaramane, received a $40,000 grant from the Center for Sustainability to fund a study that focuses on recycling and reducing food waste in the Dining Commons.

They also received a grant from the previous year and looked at how much food was being wasted in Landrum and Lakeside.

The data the professors and their research team collected during the study pertains to the fall 2017 and spring 2018 semesters.

Food waste for all students per semester for Lakeside and Landrum was 504,000 pounds in the fall and 453,600 pounds in the spring.

The professors and their team’s current research focuses on finding ways to repurpose food that is wasted and bring more awareness about sustainability to the campus through combating the results of their study from the previous year.

In all, the current research has five components which are being able to feed chickens, making composts with the waste, feeding fish with the waste, assessing the pre-consumption and post-consumption waste on a day to day basis and bringing attention to the issue on the campus

When I spoke to Afriyie-Gyawu, he mentioned freshmen play the biggest role, because freshmen are required to have meal plans.

I agree with this because since it is their first time away from home, they have the ability to do what they want and attempt to eat as much as they want since the dining commons are all you can eat.

To combat it, Afriyie-Gyawu wants to incorporate sustainability education into the SOAR orientation program, so new students can be aware of the problem at the start of their college careers.

I think that is a great idea, because many young people do not care about recycling and the environment because many aren’t directly impacted, but in the long run the effects will become more evident.

I found the results of the study shocking and I just wonder how much is wasted on other campuses across the country.

If people put in effort to educate themselves and use waste for beneficial reasons instead of contributing more to the already negative results of it, the environment will be better off.