Harvard Sustainability Study

While there have been multiple efforts created by the dining service, students recognize or know little about these efforts. To establish a more well-rounded approach to sustainability, students should take a more active stance on the sustainability efforts within all dining halls at Harvard College, including Annenberg. Students becoming participating members of sustainability within the dining halls will not only create a more holistic approach but, in the process of doing so, will also teach students to act in favor of waste reduction on a broader scale. But, in order to increase the student visibility of the efforts initiated by HUDS, there must be campaigns that reach out to increase student awareness of the sustainability tactics used …show more content…
Stanford and Yale stand out among these schools. Stanford’s Sustainable Food Program has received the 4 Star Green Restaurant Certification by the Green Restaurant Association. Stanford is one of three colleges within the United States to have this accolade. (Sustainable Operations, n.d.) Yale has been at the forefront of national efforts for sustainability programs in college and university dining halls. (Sustainability is a Core Value for Yale Hospitality, n.d.) They have implemented several similar initiatives in line with Harvard. But, both have gone above and beyond Harvard’s sustainability program using campaigns that encourage student participation. These include “Dining in the Daylight”, “Love Food, Hate Waste”, “Erase the Waste”, and “More This, Less That”. (CITE HERE) Specifically, the trayless dining, founded from the campaign ‘Love Food, Hate Waste’, has reduced food waste greatly. Besides the reduction of waste that students of these institutions actively participate in, there are three other benefits to trayless dining. Stanford’s website mentions that water consumption lowers as there is no need to clean trays, and, since there are no trays to clean, energy consumption is also lowered. As a result, less heat is used to clean dishes. Also, emissions are reduced since less waste is transferred in vehicles to landfills. (Sustainable Operations, …show more content…
But, Harvard students, who are used to carrying a tray so they can have multiple plates and cups with only one trip to the buffet area in Annenberg, voice the inconvenience of switching to trayless dining. One student responded to a question about the elimination of trays: “When the strike was on and we had no trays it altered the way I ate because I could only take with me what I could carry/balance in my hands. I had to get up and get things or take trips to grab everything I wanted which was a pain.” (Danoff, Hamilton, and Wang) Multiple other short responses concur with this statement, switching to trayless dining will be an inconvenience to most students who eat at Annenberg. The inconvenience of trayless dining is not only a concern within Annenberg, but multiple colleges, like Yale and Stanford, mention the inconvenience of switiching to trayless dining on their websites. (CITE HERE) While the inconvenience is a true, substantiated concern, complaints like these only lasted a for the first two weeks in other dining halls that implemented trayless dining. (CITE HERE) Therefore, the complaints only last during an adjustment period. One way to get around majority of the protest is to instill trayless dining at the beginning of a new school year. This will help because incoming students will not be exposed to dining with trays. Another way to combat the student-voiced inconvenience is to