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BY MATT BLEIMAN

In print | December 6, 2007

This past Monday through Wednesday, Earthlust teamed up with the Good Food Project to host a scrape-off during dinners at Sharples. Scrape-offs, which have been previously held at Sharples, are a way for these groups to show students how much food gets wasted after a typical meal. Earthlust and the Good Food Project advertised the scrape-off with signs and informative pamphlets with the hope that students would participate, both to give accurate results and to add to their composting efforts.

Students were encouraged to scrape their leftover food off into bins during the three-day long campaign. Club volunteers were at dinner between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m to aid students and inform them about the scrape-off and food waste. The food was sorted into compostable and non-compostable bins, which allows composting to happen more quickly and efficiently. Certain foods, mainly vegetable and fruit-based foods, can be composted but others cannot.

New separate bins were used in this week’s compost program, differing from the previous years’ methods of “natural composting,” which occurred in an unsorted heap behind the bleachers on the athletic fields without an aerator. The new method of composting takes into account that animal meat products slows the process of composting, and separates them accordingly.

After the scrape-off each day, the Good Food Project weighed the food to calculate the exact weight of the wasted food. According to Good Food Project coordinator Claudia Seixas ’10, the amount of food wasted in the past has diminished throughout the scrape-off week. “The idea is to reduce the amount of waste we produce,” Seixas said. “We will have bins out to collect the waste and afterwards weigh the bags to see how much is wasted.” Seixas hoped that people would see how much they wasted and become more conscious, hopefully decreasing waste over the three days of the scrape-off.

Earthlust member Nicholas Buttino ‘08 led Earthlust’s involvement in the project.

“The goal is to try to show people how much they waste individually and as a community,” he said. Buttino said that after the project is over they plan to publicize the results for the campus to see, though it might be difficult to correctly and accurately compile the results. Buttino said he hoped that people would help contribute by properly sorting their food after the dinners.

Buttino also hoped the project will successfully raise awareness for food waste in the community. “We know there is quite a bit of concern for the environment within the student body, but people working with environmental awareness want to show that students care,” Buttino said.

Buttino said he hoped that the scrape-off will do just that in a more specific context: make students more aware of how much they waste and get people thinking about trying to reduce waste.

The Good Food Project will be taking the compostable trash and using it for their new composting program. The program started a few weeks ago, and the Good Food Project hopes that it will be a continued project. Using a Foundation Grant from the Lang Center, Good Food members bought materials and set up a compost pile behind the bleachers at the athletic fields. The compost pile is covered by a blue tarp in one of the cinder-block dividers. Students get credit for work-study to maintain the compost pile. Food unused by Sharples was directly sent to CityTeam Ministries’ kitchens in Philadephia, where the unused food is donated to low-income families and homeless individuals. In the past, leftovers from the meals of students were sent to an incinerator in Chester, where waste is treated through combustion and converted to ash and gases. Seixas says that rather than burning the food, composting it would be much better for the college environmentally.

Compost coordinator for the Good Food Project James Marzluff ’08 will be comparing the weights of the compostable and non-compostable scrape-off foods to see just how much food at Sharples could be composted instead of burned.

Marzluff has been helping to collect compost scraps from Sharples since the project started. “Every day we collect kitchen scraps like apple peels, melon rinds, coffee grounds and lettuce trimmings, haul them down to the compost pile in our trusty golf cart [from the arboretum] and mix them with leaves and woodchips provided by the grounds staff. We turn the pile over a few times a week, and so far things have been going well,” Marzluff said.

Marzluff also sees the benefits that making a compost heap will produce for the campus.

“A properly built compost pile really heats up as a result of microbial action, and can get as hot as 1400F, effectively killing any pathogens or weed seeds and creating a rich, sweet-smelling and sanitary hummus that we will use to grow more vegetables in the spring,” he said.

For now, the scrape-off will be a one-time project and collections for the compost heap will be a separate initiative maintained by the Good Food Project.

The group hopes to have more workers to sustain the program. Additionally, it is possible that future scrape-offs will be planned. “We currently do not have plans to implement it on a regular basis, although that could change next semester,” Marzluff said.

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