Hello friends!
To start things off, my song recommendation: Shot Down by Khalid
I hope y’all are doing well! On Tuesday, the Environmental Core did a food waste audit for a dining hall on campus.
What’s the point of a food waste audit?
We want to find out how much food students throw away a day, especially in terms of meat, edible, and compostable food waste. After that, we’re going to analyze the data, raise awareness about food waste (by passing out flyers and putting up signs in the halls), and then do another audit to see if a sizable decrease in food waste per capita. We hope that this data will help us try to implement a substantial composting program in the dining halls, as well as getting students to understand how the food that they throw out impacts the community and their environment.
How’d it go?
It went really well! Of course, there are always going to be a few discrepancies in any human-based research project, but we can always take these into account when we present out data. It was also quite exciting to plan, and I definitely learned a lot, even though I was so tired out by it that I almost fell asleep riding home and the end of the day.
the scale we used to weight the waste every hour
What else?
The audit actually uses a lot of the skills that I learn in my engineering classes. For example, when we were measuring the weight of the waste and writing up our report, we used a lot of skills that I learned while writing lab reports for my Introduction to Chemistry class that I took freshman year. We also had the find the most effective way to get people to throw out their waste properly and quickly, which involved a lot of on-the-spot thinking that we learn in our classes.
All in all, this was a very successful food waste audit. The reason I love the Environmental Core so much is that it allows its members to take the reigns on their big ideas, so we have hands on experience on how to plan and execute a project from scratch. Plus it’s always cool to see how things you learn in class can be applied to the real world.
