From disposable masks to takeout-food containers, single-use products have become common facets of life in the pandemic. They’re also raising a question for Vermont colleges welcoming thousands of students back to campuses this fall: How can residential schools uphold student and staff health while minimizing waste?
At several Vermont colleges, one area where that question has emerged is dining. Students in college dining halls typically eat at packed tables and serve themselves food while standing shoulder-to-shoulder in line with peers. To mitigate the risk of Covid-19 spread that such setups would bring, colleges are finding new ways to deliver students food — with varied results when it comes to environmental impact.
At Middlebury College, roughly 2,160 of 2,260 students enrolled in fall classes live on-campus and eat in the college’s three dining halls. At each meal, students are greeted with signs encouraging social distancing and are handed individual food items by dining staff. Each item comes in its own compostable container, and students depart with stacks of containerized food to eat outside or in dorm rooms.
The system allows for safe distance among students and dining staff, and has helped limit the college’s student Covid-19 cases to two. But it has also caused heaping piles of disposable waste to build up in the past several weeks, according to Middlebury junior Connor Wertz, a director of the college’s student Environmental Sustainability Committee.
“It’s crazy to see stacks and stacks of disposable containers around campus,” Wertz said. “In a way, it was like putting in front of our eyes what was happening … and it’s started conversations across campus asking, ‘if Middlebury’s so environmentally friendly, why are we doing this’?”
While nearly all of the packaging used in Middlebury’s dining halls is compostable, the deluge of containers students throw away after eating each meal has created so much trash that most of it is going directly to landfill, according to Eva Fillion, Middlebury’s sustainability communication and outreach coordinator.
Staff in Middlebury’s recycling center, which according to its website diverts up to 68% of waste from landfills in a typical year, have had to stop re-sorting waste because of health concerns posed by students’ dirty containers, Fillion wrote in an email to VTDigger. And the quantity of waste from the containers has outpaced the number of compost bins around campus, Wertz said.
“The amount of compostable containers is overwhelming our composting system and we cannot handle this much waste,” Fillion wrote. “Items on campus that are not put into the correct trash, recycling or compost bin are getting sent to the landfill.”
From a sustainability standpoint, compostable waste being sent to a landfill is still preferable to plastic waste, Wertz said. However, it’s far from ideal.
“Compostable anything is better than Styrofoam anything, and that’s good, so I appreciate the college making that step,” he said. “But also I feel like there’s a little bit of a greenwashing story there.”
At the University of Vermont, where about a third of 12,000 enrolled students live on campus and frequent dining halls, dining staff and administrators have taken a different approach: Rather than distributing food in disposable packaging, over the summer they expanded a program begun several years ago that serves students to-go food in washable, reusable containers.
The program, called EcoWare, last fall served about 300 meals in the reusable containers each week, according to UVM Dining Sustainability Manager Marissa Watson. Several weeks into UVM’s semester this fall, the program has served an average of 5,100 meals weekly, Watson said. UVM students also have the option to eat distanced dine-in meals inside dining halls.
Corey Berman, UVM’s recycling and zero waste program manager, said one result of the program has been that, beyond waste from single-use wipes and other sanitizers, he’s seen little increase in on-campus waste since students’ return as compared to a typical semester.
The program relies on students dropping off dirty containers in bins around campus after they’ve used them to eat, Watson said, which she was initially uncertain about — but so far, participation has been high.
“We haven’t really seen an increase in compostable containers on campus because we’ve been packing in the EcoWare containers,” Watson said.
Middlebury, too, launched a program to offer to-go food in reusable, washable containers beginning in the fall of 2019. But in deciding between using reusable or disposable containers in the dining halls this fall, Fillion said, the health risk to staff and students posed by reusable ones appeared too great.
“In terms of sustainability, while it is still a central focus of ours, health and safety really need to take a front seat,” Fillion wrote.
Both Middlebury and UVM have devoted substantial effort to making their institutions more sustainable in the past few years, and are among a list of institutions of higher education that have pledged to remove investments from fossil fuels: Middlebury last January pledged to divest its $1 billion endowment, and UVM made the same pledge with its $500 million endowment this summer.
VTDigger reached out to officials at Norwich University and Bennington College to discuss the topic of disposable waste on those campuses but did not hear back.
While the high quantity of such material at Middlebury is daunting, Fillion and Wertz hope that it will dissipate as normal, sitdown dining hall options become available in the later phases of Middlebury’s reopening. In the meantime, both are working to organize volunteers to ensure waste is placed in the correct bins and improve sorting.
Beyond cutting down on waste and sorting it better in the short term, Wertz said, he hopes that this fall serves as a chance for Middlebury students to learn about sustainability and its implications for their communities.
“I would really like to see this turn into an educational, community based opportunity,” Wertz said. “As Middlebury kids, we don’t really care to know about where our waste goes until it’s stacked up in front of our faces.”