When visiting the Campus Center Café after 8 p.m., the first thing that might catch one’s eye are the piles of to-go containers covering the tables, littered with GrubHub receipts.
While the GrubHub system may be quick and convenient, there’s a darker side to it when it comes to the waste the orders generate — whether that be food waste or material waste from the containers, to-go cups or wrappers.
“At the end of the night, a lot of the orders get thrown out and wasted just because people don’t come in to get their food,” said Marie Willems ’27, a cafe employee. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily the fault of the cafe, but at the end of the night anything that’s not used has to get thrown away, so that’s going to generate a lot of waste.”
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the most common form of waste found in landfills is food waste, accounting for 24% of the solid waste that ends up in landfills.
In addition to problems with food waste, waste from single-use materials also have significant environmental ramifications, and is one of the other issues with the GrubHub ordering system in the cafés. Willems said that as a café employee, it’s easy to see the impact of the waste from the orders because trash and compost bins often overflow, making it difficult to separate the compostable materials from the non-compostable materials.
“Throughout my shift, it’s really hard as it gets busy to be paying attention to where your trash is going, and often if the compost is full, then that trash just ends up going in the trash even if it is compostable,” said Willems.
While this system seems far from perfect, Jeremy Bonios, the retail manager for Campus Café and The Compass Café said it’s an improvement from past systems that had less organization and included only one “shop.” Now, the various shops, such as the Swift-Start Café and the Sunrise Griddle.
“Those multiple shops allow each of the respective stations to get their orders through more quickly, with the goal of getting students to come in and pick up their food,” said Bonios.
When orders take a long time to come out, students are less likely to pick up their orders as they get busy or forget about the order. With the increased efficiency of the new system, café employees are able to get orders to students more quickly, increasing the likelihood of the orders being picked up and potentially decreasing the amount of waste from abandoned orders.
“I haven’t been counting item by item, but if I just look at what we’re having to throw away, compost or recycle compared to what we were in semesters past, it’s been a noticeable difference,” said Bonios.
However, there seems to be a general consensus that there is still room for improvement. Although most of the materials used in the orders are technically compostable, there are still remaining issues with disposing of the materials correctly.
Bonios said most of the problem lies in the students’ incorrect disposal of waste, such as placing non-compostable products in the compost bin or vice versa.
“The better system would be if we had more clearly marked containers, and because so much of this stuff is compostable, if we had better receptacles to receive that compostable waste,” said Bonios. “It’s great that [Smith is] spending the money and resources on compostable products, but if people are not putting them in the correct places […] that’s what I find to be my biggest struggle.”
Willems, on the other hand, suggests that the issue lies in the size of the waste bins.
“I definitely think Smith could be doing a better job — maybe just having bigger bins? I always feel like the trash cans fill up way too fast there,” said Willems. “I don’t know if they just don’t have the staff to empty them, but just in general I don’t think they have large enough trash bins or compost sections for the trash build-up, and that just makes things dirtier and harder to put things where they actually belong.”
There are various ideas for what could be done to improve the situation. Elena Roby ’27 is a part of the Food Rescue program that recycles leftover food from the dining halls to be served at the kitchen at St. John’s Episcopal Church. She believes a possible solution lies in the new system of in-person ordering that was recently implemented in the Campus Center Café.
“Perhaps people who order in person could then receive their food on reusable plates, etc., the stuff that’s used in the dining halls, and that could potentially cut waste in half, if not more. That could be a first step and maybe we could build off of it to decrease the single-use waste and also the food waste,” said Roby.
Bonios proposes a solution that relies on students, focusing more attention on making sure that students are picking up their food and disposing of waste properly.
“I think a big part of it would be, I don’t want to say thrown onto the students, but a greater student responsibility, that if they’re ordering food, that they actually come and pick the food up,” said Bonios. “That can be a big drain on resources and labor, greenhouse gasses, whatever, if people are ordering things and they’re not picking it up. So we’ve got to get students better habituated with actually picking up food that they ordered.”
Going forward, Bonios hopes to work with other sustainability-oriented groups on campus, such as the Center for the Environment, Ecological Design & Sustainability (CEEDS), to determine how to implement more sustainable processes into the café operations.
“I would like to sit down with CEEDS and see what could be done. I had a meeting with some students over the summer about labeling, because there’s not consistent labeling throughout campus,” said Bonios. “It’s kind of at the discretion of the building as to what they do, and I think that would be a big driver to have a consistent verbiage and pictures.”
Roby says eliminating all single-use materials from the cafés is the ideal solution and that should be what is being worked towards throughout all efforts to increase sustainability on campus.
“I think that there could be more done generally across the whole campus to encourage the use of reusable cups, plates, everything, and I think there’s more that Smith could be doing to discourage people from using single-use items,” said Roby.
“Obviously the ideal is to not be using single-use stuff, period,” said Roby. “I know that’s not possible entirely, but working towards limiting it as much as possible is the ultimate goal.”
