Campus eliminates virtually all waste from dining halls

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. — Between the Marketplace and dining halls, students and faculty at Binghamton University have many options for eating on campus. But with food being delivered six days a week to meet campus’ demands, waste is inevitable.

However, students and Sodexo employees have incorporated policies to eliminate virtually all food waste in dining halls and the Marketplace. One facet to BU’s food waste prevention is donating all the leftover food at the end of the day to those in need in the local community.

The Food Recovery Network (FRN) is a national nonprofit organization taking place on campuses all across America designed to donate leftover food to local charities. Maya Yair, ‘14, began the initiative at BU last year through Hillel’s Committee for Social Justice.

Sabrina Scull, a coordinator for the FRN program at BU and a senior majoring in environmental studies, said that every morning food delivery trucks pick up leftover items from all the dining halls and transport them to College-in-the-Woods Dining Hall.

By around 6 p.m., volunteers from various student organizations such as Hillel package the food, which then gets picked up by Volunteers of America and the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse. They then deliver it to local charities and soup kitchens, like the Salvation Army of Binghamton.

“This is so important because we are helping provide homeless and starving individuals with a steady supply of food that is easily accessible to them,” Scull said. “We are also keeping BU’s leftover food from becoming landfill waste.”

Richard Herb, chef manager of College-in-the-Woods Dining Hall, said campus-style meal plans will always result in some level of food waste at the end of the day because kitchens must always be stocked.

“With us trying to meet those requirements,” Herb said, “there’s food waste that occurs as a natural course of doing business.”

According to Herb, the program began its trial run last semester in CIW and was so successful that it has spread to all residential dining halls, the Marketplace and Tillman Lobby.

“We saw that it was such a wonderful program and it really allowed us to utilize leftovers in a way that we’ve never been able to before,” Herb said.