The UCSD Housing, Dining, and Hospitality Department implemented a compost system in August to cut waste from dining facilities.
Last year, dining hall food waste could not be composted because there was no permanent on-campus composting facility and — because of the budget cuts — UCSD could not outsource the task. However, HDH representatives began communication with the city about the new program last year.
HDH has been working since August 2010 with the City of San Diego Food Scrap Recycling program to compost more of the university’s waste on a weekly basis.
In the new program, the food scraps are collected each weekday from dining hall kitchens and put into a compactor. The compacter is then emptied once a week at the Miramar Landfill Greenery section, where they are broken down into marketable fertilizer to be sold. UCSD does not receive any of the revenue.
The program will save the university about $30 per ton of disposals by composting food scraps instead of dumping them into a landfill, according to Housing and Dining Sustainability Manager Krista Mays.
“We think that by [having] the food scrap recycling program, we can divert about 53 percent of our waste from dining halls,” Mays said.
This waste percentage is based on the average three million meals served by HDH each year and the industry standard of 0.3 pounds wasted food per meal served.
In the seven weeks between the program’s start in August and Sept. 23, HDH composted over 15 tons of food scraps. Within the first week of school, they were able to compost 4.3 tons.
Currently, the program only extends to the food scraps from HDH dining venues, such as the dining hall kitchens and their catering service. Most of the waste produced here comes from food scraps left over after preparation of meals.
A major concern to the composting program is contamination of the compostable materials with non-compostable plastics and metals.
This means students’ food scraps are not being composted because of the worry that students will not know what to compost and what to throw away.
To stay part of San Diego’s food composting program, the compost material that comes in to the center must contain less than 1 percent contaminants. If this requirement is not consistently met, HDH cannot participate in the program.
Since it is not feasible to examine every single bag of food scraps for contaminants, in order for HDH to compost students’ waste, the department heavily relies on students to place food scraps in the proper containers.
“We’ll be working on different ways of educating students, whether it’s with YouTube videos or articles or whatever it is, to try to get people to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Mays said.
To help students properly compost, HDH has relabeled the compost bins as “food scrap” bins.
“We believe that ‘food scraps’ is a pretty understandable thing,” Mays said. “You know what packaging is, you know what food is. And if it’s not food, don’t put it in [the food scraps bin]. The easy part about the program is it’s all food — any food scraps — so it [includes] bones, meats, skin [and] egg shells.”
According to Mays, the transition into collecting the post-consumer food scraps will be a slow one.
She said the plan is to start with one dining facility’s post-consumer scraps and progress until all of the dining halls can reliably produce contaminant-free compost.
