College consortium receives EPA award for food waste reduction efforts

LANCASTER, Pa. — Josh Hooper says when he was at Franklin & Marshall College in the 1970s, there was no environmental studies major. But he always had a passion for the subject.

“I would have majored in it if it had been available,” he said.

Today, the Class of 1974 graduate is executive director of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resources Consortium, known as PERC, an organization through which colleges and universities collaborate on environmental initiatives.

On Thursday, he was back at F&M to accept the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Recovery Challenge Endorser of the Year award for 2014 on PERC’s behalf.

PERC has created the Food Recovery Challenge, a program to reduce food waste in dining halls and throughout campuses.

Twenty-two Pennsylvania colleges and universities participate, among them F&M and Millersville University. The program reaches more than 100,000 students.

Schools in the program reduce waste in three ways, Hooper said. They pre-empt waste by aligning food purchases closely with consumption patterns. Food scraps are composted. Thirdly, edible unconsumed food is donated to organizations that feed the hungry.

The quantities involved can be large. In 2014, F&M sent 73.4 tons of material to the Terra-Gro composting facility at Oregon Dairy.

“Everything in the dining hall pretty much is compostable,” said Julia Fleisch, a junior at F&M majoring in Sociology and Spanish who emceed Thursday’s award presentation.