How College Students Can Address the Problem of Food Waste

By: Ben Baisinger-Rosen

This year, WashU implemented a new university dining system, switching university food providers while also establishing partnerships with St. Louis-area restaurants across campus. This change presents an opportunity to explore the problem of food waste and how college students can create positive change on that issue.

Food waste is a pervasive national issue. According to the EPA, more than one-third of all food produced in the United States gets wasted. This waste clearly creates tremendous ethical and equity-based concerns, which is why so many significant advocacy groups focus on providing equitable food access. Beyond these concerns, food waste also presents significant environmental concerns. According to government studies, the resources that go into producing the amount of food wasted annually in the US are equivalent to the emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants, enough water and energy to supply 50 million homes, and an area of land equal to California and New York put together. Moreover, when food waste rests in landfills, it releases methane gas, which is several times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide emissions. In other words, we are acting tremendously unsustainably and contributing a high volume of emissions for food we do not even eat. This violates the basic premise of sustainable behavior, which the UN defines as meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability to fulfill the needs of the future. As it stands, we are harming the future without fully meeting the needs of the present.

College students have an important role to play in solving this problem. According to NPR, because colleges and universities cannot be certain of the precise number of students that will use food services, they are often forced to over-prepare and end up throwing out a significant amount of unused food. As such, college campuses as a group throw out a total of 22 million pounds of uneaten food each year. While this amount of food is a relatively small share of overall food waste in the United States, it signals a key feature of the greater issue of food waste: this issue is not one to which responsibility can be assigned to one group. It requires a collective effort from all areas because contribution to the problem of food waste is wide-ranging.

The role that college students and their universities can play starts with education and awareness. For many, the environmental consequences of food waste are not intuitive, which makes it difficult to encourage people to make sacrifices when the benefits of doing so are not immediately apparent. As such, the primary solution to food waste for college students comes with education about the problem itself. Only when students are informed of a problem and its magnitude can they begin to make environmentally-conscious choices. The other key methods to address food waste on college campuses come from the administrative side. First, universities can more effectively plan their food usage on a day-to-day basis by reviewing the consumption patterns of the student body to ensure that food waste is minimized. Once universities get a better sense of how the student body consumes food over time, they can more effectively manage food waste. Secondly, universities also need to implement measures to ensure that uneaten food can be repurposed instead of being diverted into landfills. Options include measures like composting bins and repurposing spaces on campus into small-scale farming plots that reuse food waste for future growth. Finally, college students can join advocacy groups that help to solve the problem of food waste and unequal food access on a wider scale. As a whole, by educating college students about the pervasiveness of food waste and giving them ways to address the problem in their daily life, universities can help the problem of food waste by reducing their own contributions and by developing strategies for the next generation of consumers.