Cafeteria Trays: Time For A Substitution

To eat in the university cafeteria is to engage in a sport of sorts.

Look to the left, and there is that now-famous boy, dropping an entire hotdog in his mouth and swallowing it whole, in one gulp, amidst cheers and table pounding. To the right, a group gathered around an oval table stalwartly moves through trays laden with food—fruit loops, cheese pizza, vanilla cake, soft serve, baked chicken, and rice pilaf—like a football team’s offensive line presses down the field.

As they walk out of the cafeteria, clutching bananas, these sportsmen and women scoff at the food that challenged them–“there was nothing good to eat today!”–and toss their mauled, yet still heaving, trays onto the belt, where it is whisked away to be finished off by shooting jet-streams of water. There’s a chance, however, that this game--played in colleges everywhere--may be losing a player.

Aramark Higher Education, a food service provider for campuses, stadiums, and conference centers, has recently published a white paper showing the environmental benefits of trayless dining in the university cafeterias—and people are listening.

For the study, they solicited 25 higher education institutions to go “trayless” for a period of time in 2008. The results: without trays, food waste was reduced by an average of 1.2 to 1.8 ounces per person per meal, leading to a 25 to 30 percent reduction per person each day. Yah, okay, so maybe it’s not a shocking finding that taking away trays reduced waste; it makes sense that with only your hands, you can’t grab as much in the buffet line and so will have less excess to throw away. But Aramark’s report is an interesting play in a longer “going trayless” game.

The University of Maine at Farmington lost their platters in February 2007. They estimate that they have reduced overall waste by 65,000 pounds per year, and saved around $57,000 from heating less water, buying less detergent, and more.

At Grand Valley State University, a college in Allendale, Michigan, trayless dining results in 960 pounds less waste per week, and a reduction in 540 pounds of dish detergent and sanitizers per year. But let the following fact drive home the point that vanquishing trays will help the environment: it takes up to a gallon of water to hose down a cafeteria tray. At Grand Valley, if half of its 19,000 undergraduates eat lunch in a trayless cafeteria, at least 9,000 gallons of water will be saved. And that’s only considering losing serving plates at one meal. This number astounds me when I consider our coming water crisis, or how far all that water could go in Africa, where an average family uses only 5 gallons of water per day.

Why then hasn’t every university begun the no-tray cheer? According to Aramark’s study, there’s a fear that college cafeteria champions are so inculcated with the idea that trays are part of dining that they won’t like not having them. Perhaps. But I have a hunch that if you show today’s blossoming Gen Green the water and waste savings stats, and throw in some Cocoa Puffs where the trays are, and they’ll stay in the game.