A month ago, the student run group Campus Greens’s Water Campaign approached Bon Appetit about moving toward permanent tray-less dining halls in order to promote sustainable environmental policies.

“Campus Greens approached us with their focus, back in mid October, and then Bon Appetit was predisposed to this anyways. We had tossed it around and talked about it a little bit,” said Roger Edens, the General Manager of Bon Appetit at Whitman.

“Bon Appetit was interested in going tray-less but they wanted to know if students would be behind it. I just went on to survey monkey and made a survey. There were 200 respondents total. We just asked what you think about it,” said Junior Tyler Harvey, a member of Campus Greens.

After the members of the Water Campaign collected the student data, they presented their results to Bon Appetit. In their survey, 183 or about 91.5 percent of students said that they would either support or strongly support the measure. Only 6.5 percent were opposed.

“We’re looking at the reduction of food waste and because food waste in a landfill produces methane gas and methane gas is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that’s Bon Appetit’s take,” emphasized Edens. Psychologically, larger trays have been shown to correlate with students taking more food than they can eat and consequently wasting it. In landfills, the methane gas emitted by rotting food has a greater capacity to trap energy from the sun in Earth’s atmosphere.

“At other accounts where they’ve actually measured the food before and after, they found an almost 30 percent reduction in food waste,” said Edens.

From Campus Greens’ perspective, the move toward fewer trays in dining halls has other important environmental and well as social benefits.

“We imagine it’ll save water, energy, detergent, and hopefully prevent food waste and maybe encourage good eating habits. People commented on how like having trays defined your place at the table and made it hard to bring in a community. People thought that it kind of disrupted social interaction. We decided that it would be best to keep a few trays around for students and people who felt that they absolutely needed them,” said Harvey. As for the trays that were removed, they will be donated once a place has been found.

For the future, Bon Appetit and Campus Greens’ Water Campaign both plan to pursue other ways of improving sustainability.

“Bon Appetit in general is looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Something that’s coming is that we’re going to start reducing the number of pineapples and bananas we use,” said Edens.

Pineapples and bananas are foods that have high carbon footprints because they have to be imported from distant locations, which requires fossil fuel burning transportation.

The Water Campaign also plans to install more water saving aerators and shower heads as well as investigate the possibility of having food plants on campus.