Photo by Lenox Johnson ‘24
When compostable materials are put in regular trash, they end up in landfills rather than compost.
By Woodlief McCabe ’23
Staff Writer
The amount of waste produced at Mount Holyoke is hard to miss. Trash cans overflow with disposable containers and utensils, and food scraps fill plastic tubs located where conveyor belts took dishes in previous years. The pandemic has made changes to dining practices necessary for ensuring the health and safety of the Mount Holyoke community. However, the information the student body receives about these practices is lacking. When it comes to issues like sustainability, transparency is crucial. Students need to know about our sustainability practices so we can not only properly participate in them, but also hold our institutions accountable about their commitments to sustainability and investments in green solutions.
The Dining Services section of the Mount Holyoke website emphasizes sustainability. According to Rich Perna, executive director of Auxiliary Services, who oversees dining services, this site is “actively update[d].” If this is the case, it is disingenuous that — as of Nov. 11 — there is a paragraph describing the partnership with alumna Alison Rogers’ company USEFULL in the present tense, giving no indication that this program has not yet been implemented. Early in the semester, students were told that USEFULL would be providing every student reusable take-out containers, but the College has yet to tell us why that hasn’t happened.
Perna did not hesitate to explain the details of the discrepancy. According to Perna, ongoing pandemic-related issues with the supply chain as well as limited resources at the overseas factory have stalled production and pushed back the date that we will receive the containers. The new goal is to have the containers on campus in January.
Perna also noted that dining services are suffering from staff shortages. “If all the [USEFULL] products landed here today,” he said, “I don’t have the resources to wash them.” Perna stressed that it is more important to keep the staff from being overworked than to try to get all the dishes washed. Part of sustainability, for Perna, is preventing a health crisis amongst the staff, by not pushing them “to the max” the way food service jobs often do. He also explained how dining staff are encouraged to find uses for every part of their ingredients. When there is food waste, it is put into a dehydrator, where it becomes a coffee-grounds-like material which is picked up weekly by a composting company.
Perna provided a wealth of helpful information to understand the complicated situation Mount Holyoke is in, but the conversation also revealed how much students don’t know. Students should know why we never got any reusable containers, why we can’t use regular dishes even though Blanch is back to full capacity dining and what happens to the separated food scraps. The school needs honest descriptions of sustainability practices on their website, and clear explanations of the composting and recycling systems accessible to students.
Mount Holyoke can do better with its composting efforts as well. Students should feel good about their school offering compostable materials for dining. However, successfully using sustainable materials isn’t enough. Compostable materials have to actually be composted, otherwise they just become trash. The process of composting is an aerobic process, meaning it requires oxygen. In order to be exposed to oxygen, organic materials are moved around as they decompose, and the decomposed materials can be used as fertilizer for farming or for land reclamation. In landfills, waste is dumped, tightly packed and then covered in a layer of soil. Any compostable materials receive almost no oxygen and cannot decompose. Even if they did, landfills do not extract organic materials to be reused. Some alternative corn-based plastics are made of polylactic acid (PLA). The study, “Life-Cycle Assumptions of Landfilled Polylactic Acid Underpredict Methane Generation” by Max J. Krause and Timothy G. Townsend indicates that PLA may release methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide when decomposing anaerobically in a landfill. The bottom line is that if compostable materials do not end up in the compost, they become trash.
There are other issues around disposing compostable paper products and utensils. Some composting centers won’t accept them for a variety of reasons, but USA Recycling, the company that picks up Mount Holyoke’s food waste, is not one such center. It takes only one click on the company’s webpage to see that they accept not just certified compostable products into their organics recycling program, but a wide variety of others, including waxed cardboard as well as coffee grounds and filters. It’s hard, then, to understand why these items are not sent out with the food scraps, especially given how full the half dozen trash cans on the way out of Blanch are. Being greener is clearly within Mount Holyoke’s grasp, and we have every reason to act on it.
The energy shown through involvement on campus is a clear indication that the student body wants Mount Holyoke to be sustainable. The Climate Justice Coalition worked tirelessly to push for the College to divest from fossil fuels, and claimed a cautious victory in October when the College officially announced that it will be “moving with intention” to divest. The statement tries to emphasize how small the College’s investments are, and set the divestment time frame at ten years. Mount Holyoke seems to want to appear committed to campus sustainability, but is ambiguous when it comes to the actual work needed for large structural changes. We need full transparency and an effort by the school to uphold the commitment it seems so proud of.