Sodexo hosted a Weigh the Waste event at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) to encourage students to monitor and minimize their carbon footprint.
For the one-week event, held during Sodexo’s WasteLESS week late last month, SCSU students scraped their leftover food scraps into a large container in the dining hall, which sat on a floor checkweighing scale. The scale remained on during the entire event, which allowed students to see the weight increase with each plate.
The dining hall collected more than 1,700 pounds of food waste by the end of the week, and the collected food waste will be composted.
“I think WasteLESS week was very beneficial for us students because we were able to see how much food really goes to waste,” said Hailey Ortiz, a first-year student at SCSU, in a statement. “This teaches us to be more mindful and reduce the amount of food that would go to waste so that there is less harm to the environment and less food insecurity for others.”
Prior to this event, Sodexo at SCSU had worked on other food-waste reduction initiatives, such as weighing leftover food on the line. After the leftover food was weighed, it was then distributed to the community through the Food Recovery Network, a non-profit organization. During the 2021-22 school year, Sodexo and SCSU’s office of sustainability saved over 8,456 pounds of food from the landfill, according to the statement.