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 11 ARROW • week of March 6 - 12, 2013

STUDENTS PRODUCE ABOUT A HALF CUP OF WASTE. CHARTWELLS’ GOAL IS TO REDUCE IT TO A QUARTER CUP OF WASTE PER STUDENT

UNIVERSITY dining tries to reduce wasteCOLLECT

FIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE SLEEPRead managing editor Rachel Weatherford’s blog about improving your sleeping habits at southeastArrow.com.+

The pink slip: Students sometimes have problems receiving their mailANDREA GILS COPY EDITOR

Many students run excited to their mailboxes to see what their friends or parents have sent. Unfortunately, that excitement can fade away when they open the mailbox and see the pink slip the resident assistant leaves is not there.

That “pink slip” is a piece of 3-by-2 inches neon pink paper that the resident assistant on duty, who is on the front desk when a package is delivered, places inside a student’s mailbox when the package is too big to fit in it.

Multimedia journalism major Jacob Haun said that, as a residence assistant, he had one instance where a letter was delivered off the typical delivery time frame.

“I had a letter come in one time that was really, really late, like we are talking about three weeks late and it was already here, but it came from someplace far away like from South Dakota,” Haun said. “But it was ridicu-lously late, and it had gotten lost in the mail in central receiving.”

Haun said he has heard of residents on campus who said they had packages come in on a Saturday afternoon and they won’t get them until Tuesday or Wednesday.

Public relations major Mallory Olwig left her medicine and make up bag at her home

in St. Louis and her mom sent a package to her with the contents, which arrived on a Saturday.

“I had to call and go pick it up because they forgot it in the mail room and sent the mail truck out without it and the next day was Sun-day and I wasn’t going to get it then,” Olwig said.

The University Receiving and Mail Servi-ces office picks up and delivers intra-campus mail, distributes mail and packages to resi-dence halls coming from USPS, FedEx and UPS. According to the University Receiving and Mail Services manager, Charles Hirsch, a university employee picks up the mail from the post office at 9:30 a.m. every day and deli-very to campus buildings begins around 1 p.m. When mail is delivered, outgoing mail is picked up to deliver the following day. Deli-very to the residence halls takes place from 10:45 to 11 a.m.

The mail distribution on campus is divided into three different routes: north, south and central campus. Hirsch said the south route includes the River Campus, the Law Enfor-cement Academy and Kent Library. The cen-tral route goes from Grauel to Scully Buil-ding and will include Academic Hall when it is reopened. The north route includes the Show Me Center, Dempster Hall, Otto and Della

Seabaugh Polytechnic Building and the Stu-dent Recreation Center North.

According to Hirsch, private mail servi-ces cannot deliver any packages once there is no one in the front desk of the hall and the buildings are locked. If this happens, the company keeps the package or mail in the establishment until staff from Univer-sity Receiving picks it up the following Mon-day. The buildings that private mail servi-ces can get into are Towers Complex, Merick Hall and Vandiver Hall. These can receive mail on Saturday and will be affected by the USPS change in the system, effective in August, where mail will be delivered from Monday through Friday only, while package delivery will remain Monday through Saturday.

If a package from UPS or FedEx is delivered directly to the residence hall, the employee at the front desk signs for the receiving of the package but no bar code scan is made. If the package is received at University Receiving, it gets scanned. This way, University Receiving can easily track where a package has been and where it should be.

Hirsch said there are also three places on campus for late pick-ups, which are Memorial Hall, Kent Library and Dempster Hall. Mail sent from these locations is picked up bet-ween 3 and 3:30 p.m.

According to Hirsch, there have been mini-mal mail delivery complaints through the years.

“This year I can’t think of any issue other than someone moved from one dorm to another and the mail got delivered to the old room,” Hirsch said.

Sophomore and psychology major, Brianna Wahl, was supposed to receive home-made cookies from her parents from Breese, Ill., for Valentine’s Day, but instead received her cookies on Feb. 19, six days after the pac-kage had arrived on campus. Her parents tracked the package and saw it arrived on campus on Feb 13. The following week, Wahl said she went to the front desk and asked for the package her parents had sent.

Wahl said she was told the package had been sitting there for some days and that she should have picked it up earlier. The problem was that Wahl said she never received the pink slip that the residence hall places in the mailbox to notify residents when they have big package to pick up.

“They said that they gave me a slip but maybe I pulled out my newspaper and I didn’t see it, or maybe it fell backwards into the mail room. … Maybe I looked over it or maybe they looked over it in the mail room,” Wahl said.

Southeast students eat at Towers Cafe on Monday afternoon. Photo by Drew Yount

Chartwells and ag department unite to reduce waste by compostingMARISSA FAWCETT STAFF WRITER

Pizza crusts, half-eaten turkey sandwiches, browned apple cores and crumpled, dirty napkins — a few of the things that might be seen on students’ plates as they exit Towers Cafe. Continuing conversa-tions with friends and carelessly tip-ping their plates into the garbage cans, students carry on with their day while the trash bags carry on the waste.

Imagine this same daily ritual happening nearly 1,500 times a day, seven days a week. The amount of trash builds up as fast as the trash bags can be changed, which hap-pens approximately 15 times a day. By the way, that is without adding in the waste from other on-campus dining establishments including Olive’s, Subway, Rowdy’s and the seven in the University Center.

“I think it’s really sad,” registered dietitian Laura Vollink said. “I think that students aren’t even aware or don’t care how much they’re was-ting. I mean you can go and say, ‘Well, kids in Africa are less fortu-nate,’ and it’s sad that we see all of this waste and people don’t have enough. I see whole pieces of fruit come back, and we can’t put it back out and serve it once it’s on somebody’s plate, you know, so we have to throw that away. You know how sad that is?”

Realizing the immense amount of waste created each day, Chart-wells came up with Project Clean Plate, an initiative to help reduce food waste by students.

Chartwells employees took stu-dents’ plates as they were exiting

Towers Cafeteria last semester and measured the total amount of waste students were throwing away. They divided the total amount of waste by the number of students coming through the cafeteria to get the ave-rage amount of waste per student.

“Basically, with Project Clean Plate we are making the students aware of how much food that they are actually wasting on their plates so when you come with your plate, you’re like, ‘You’re going to mea-sure how much waste that I have?’” Vollink said. “It makes you feel a little guilty.”

Chartwells’ goal is to have a quar-ter cup of waste per student. When they measured last semester, the waste was at a half cup per student.

“So we’re not quite there [to a quarter cup] yet,” Vollink said. “It’s also our job to help make sure that they’re [students] aware of why we’re doing it first of all and even the benefits of it that we will have.”

Vollink hopes that with Project Clean Plate helping to cut back on waste, it will also lead to students realizing how to build their plate right and allow Chartwells’ food costs to decrease.

Vollink advises students to take one plate at a time and to build it conservatively.

“We also have started serving our proteins,” Vollink said. “We star-ted last spring. At first, students were not very happy with us, you know. It’s still all you can eat. You can come back up and get as much as you want, but I think that’s hel-ped with the waste part of it and the overeating part of it, so I’m happy in both respects, I guess. It’s either way they’re wasting less. So we’ve seen

a reduction in our food costs from that too because kids aren’t, you know, wasting as much.”

There is always going to be stu-dents that have a little bit of waste on their plates, though, so Chart-wells wanted to find a better way to get rid of it, other than throwing it away.

This is why they teamed up with department of agriculture assistant professor Dr. Sven Svenson, who was more than willing to take the waste off of Chartwells’ hands.

Through the Charles Nemanick Alternative Agriculture Garden, the campus compost garden located behind the Abe Stuber Track and Field Complex, some of Chartwells’ waste will be turned into a usable soil amendment.

“You are taking organic waste that is essentially unstable and making it stable,” Svenson said.

The workers at the compost gar-den will start to gradually accept some of Chartwells’ waste in March

to gage how much it can handle and then adjust the amount based on how well it goes, Svenson said.

The waste items the compost garden will initially be accepting are back-of-the-house products, paper napkins and coffee grounds.

“It seems like it’s not that much,” Svenson said. “But a five-gallon bucket a day times a month, now you have a pile.”

Svenson explained that the waste will be transported from the Towers cafeteria kitchen by horticulture students three days a week to the compost garden. At the compost garden, there is a large, wooden box built for the waste to be dumped in.

In the box, there will be a tem-porary solid bottom layer made up of something like newspaper, a second layer of brown compost, which is compost made of things like leaves and sticks, and the waste from Chartwells will be added to the top.

The key ingredient to speeding

up the compost cycle is worms at the very bottom that will eat through the waste.

“We use red wriggler worms,” Svenson said. “They’re often used for fishing. They’re very active and work quickly. They work up to the fresh food, which will be at the top of the box.”

With the use of the worms, the waste will take about four to six weeks to be made into a soil amendment that will later be used to grow vegetables and fruits on site.

The Charles Nemanick Alterna-tive Agriculture Garden grows in-ground vegetables, blackberries, raspberries, table grapes, tomatoes and blueberries.

The plan is to get Chartwells’ waste for the compost garden in exchange for vegetables to serve in the cafeteria.

“Cherry tomatoes for salad we can supply for a good while,” Sven-son said.