A Greener UMass Dining…
Welcome back – we’ve been waiting for you. This week, Chancellor Holub presented a Climate Action Plan (CAP) to the university community on efforts already taken to combat global climate change and how the campus community will work as a unit to fulfill the goal of the carbon neutrality, as we move toward a more sustainable future. UMass Dining is taking an active role and has been involved from the beginning, as a member of the Environmental Performance Advisory Committee (EPAC) that compiled the CAP. Our EPAC food committee is probably one of the most active subcommittees on campus, with half of its members being students. Perhaps the interest in being part of the committee has something to do with their interest in food, as food does affect everyone’s lives. We had a tight deadline to meet and were given 6 weeks to come up a plan. Our goal is to achieve carbon neutrality for UMA in all food-related areas while feeding and educating our community about sustainable food issues. The committee shared UMass Dining’s mission of serving food in the most sustainable manner and also included in the report what UMass Dining is doing now, as a starting point to improve upon.
With over 14,000 students on the meal plan and being the third largest dining program in the country, we feel that food can play a vital role of supporting this lofty goal of climate neutrality on campus and we also want to take a national leadership role in doing so. We have a good baseline to work from but feel that there are so many opportunities for us to enhance our performance. We talked about growing organic food on campus, not just in the spring and summer, but throughout the year in a greenhouse, purchasing more food from student-run farms and increasing the percentage of local food purchases from 25% to 28% in the next two years. There were discussions about reducing and eliminating the use of water bottles on campus within 5 years or sooner. As the chair of the committee, I was most impressed with the passion and energy of the members. We know what we are doing now is just a beginning; to attain carbon neutrality is a mammoth task and will require everyone on campus to become involved.
One of the shining examples of efforts in sustainability for UMass Dining, was going trayless last September; it was a smooth transition and the majority of students overwhelmingly embraced the idea and were eager to take part. We had little opposition; every though students enjoy the convenience of using the trays, they were smart enough to know it was part of efforts to reduce food waste and to save water and reduce the use of chemical by not having to wash trays. Although we are still waiting for the outcome from the Waste Management Office, our preliminary results indicate food waste has decreased by 20%; this is significant considering we have close to 4 million visits at the DCs annually.
Another great example is what UMass Dining did last semester to reduce the greenhouse emissions, was to switch to using a prime vendor located in Springfield, which is only 25 minutes away, instead of using one that was an hour and half away in Connecticut – not to mention creating jobs locally, since we are the largest single customer in the Northeast for this company.
This semester we will be switching to compostable cutlery at all retail locations and promoting the use of reusable bags for the grab-and-go operations.
We know there is so much we can do to support the environment and with your help, we can accomplish some of the goals of achieving a greener UMass even faster. Please share your ideas with us on going green at UMass Dining.
This is Ken Toong and thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.
Ken Toong
Director
Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu
You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong