Food Waste at UCC
Presented by the UCC Prep Eco Warriors
Who we are
Hi there! We are the eco-warriors, and we speak for the trees. We help advocate for the environment around us and at UCC
The problem
Over the past few months, members of the eco-warriors have noticed bins full of unfinished food in both dining halls. As we took a closer look at the wasted food in the buckets, we noticed that most of the unfinished food was almost untouched. As we were exiting the hall, we thought of all of the water, land, energy and labour being wasted. Then, we thought about where the food would end up. After searching the internet, we found out that most of this food ends up in landfills, where it leads to emitting greenhouse gases. In addition, food insecurity came up into our minds and all of this food could have helped feed people in need. After seeing this for a few weeks, we said enough was enough and we decided to take action. Source ( https://www.un.org/en/observances/end-food-waste-day)
Statistics
This is the graph that we created. We measured the food waste in the Weston Hall and the Dining Hall for a week and a day. Friday has the most food waste and Wednesday has the least. A trend that we saw, when the food tastes good, there will be more food waste. This is likely because when the food tastes good, people would want to take more food resulting in a large amount of food waste.
Image gallery
These are the images we took while measuring the weight of the food waste. As you can see here, there is a different variety of foods here, and some of them are either untouched or only have one or two bites in them. There are so many untouched chicken nuggets and mini potatoes covering the rest of the food, that now that bin looks like a work of modern mosaic art.
Let's put in into perspective
The food we waste every day at UCC ranges from the weight of an adult clouded leopard (23-25 kg) to the weight of a male bear cub, which weighs about 30 kg. ( Source : https://weightofstuff.com/things-that-weigh-around-25-kilograms/)
Possible solutions
The eco warriors came together to come up with ways we can reduce our food waste at UCC. Logistically speaking, some ideas we came up with might take longer and others quicker. We decided to focus on some short term solutions that will hopefully have a quick impact on reducing our food waste and later on introduce the other ideas.
For a possible solution, we talked to Aramark staff and they will have prepared the option to have different sized portions. For example, if you can’t eat one whole hotdog, you will have the option to ask for half, or a quarter.
Advocating for yourself/speaking up. Before you let the staff pour you a serving of food, speak up and say, “ sorry that’s too much for me, can you give me a little less please?” or “Can you serve me half of that serving.Thank you”
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Holding yourself accountable and challenging yourself. We will have food scales in both halls that you can use before and after eating. Weigh your food waste at the end of lunch and see if you can create less food waste the next day until you get to little to no food waste.
We hope that you learned something new on food waste and how to prevent it. Hopefully, we can see less food waste in the bins when we weigh them. Now, the trees are slightly happier!