news

Here at Western New England College, ARAMARK Dining Services is pushing towards a more “green” friendly environment. Throughout the “tray-less” transition, we received a lot of questions about the benefits of going tray-less and how exactly we were saving water even though we still need to use trays. Hopefully, this will answer some of your basic questions.

By taking away the trays, students are more prone to piling all of their dirty dishes onto one tray, reducing the amount of water that would have been used had everyone put dishes on their own trays. By officially taking away the trays in these last few weeks of the semester we will have saved over 10,000 gallons of water. Ultimately, we are working on fashioning a new tray return area to make it compatible for dishes alone, completely eliminating the need for trays altogether. Our goal is to have this new system ready for the upcoming school year. If we do succeed in implementing this, we can save over 173,000 gallons of water in one school year.

Some other benefits of going tray-less for an entire school year are saving the amount of chemicals used and the amount of food wasted generated. Going tray-less for one school year can save roughly 560 pounds of chemicals that are going into our water systems. By students having to carry their dishes, they are less likely to overcrowd their plates, thus reducing the amount of food wasted. In one school year students, faculty and staff waster over 43,000 pounds of food, which is equivalent to 5,000 gallons of milk, over 50 full size cows or 35,000 chickens.

Overall, students responded well to the idea of being more environmentally friendly. Dining Services are continually looking for new ways to save energy and water through these small efforts. Please continue to support our goals and we as a community can only benefit from these changes.

Thank you for supporting ARAMARK Dining Services.