BOULDER, Colo. — Trayless dining in university dining halls: a simple idea, but one with few case studies and fewer reliable metrics.
“It’s supposed to save water and save energy, and people also take less food when they don’t have a tray, because they can’t stack it up as much. So you don’t have as much food waste,” says Courtlyn Carpenter, a sophomore who researched trayless dining during her freshman year at the University of Colorado Boulder.
All of CU’s dining halls currently offer trays. Carpenter says the only way to know if trayless dining would successfully improve the school’s sustainability record is if the school just gives it a try.
The University of Colorado Boulder opened its LEEDS-platinumstatus residence hall, Williams Village North, in 2011. The dorm is home to two academic programs that focus students on sustainability issues. One program, the Sustainability & Social Innovation Residential Academic Program, or SSI RAP, helped Carpenter get her trayless dining initiative off the ground.
“We were trying to get [trayless dining] implemented in some of the dining halls at CU, and [dining services] had approved the program,” Carpenter says.
But then her project hit a roadblock. Carpenter didn’t have enough beneficial evidence to support the school moving forward with trayless dining, and the project was halted by the administration.
“The most significant barrier is the layout of our dining centers, which makes it difficult to implement,” says Amy Beckstrom, director of auxiliary and dining services at CU. “Trayless dining can work in smaller operations, but in larger dining centers like we have, trayless dining can be messy, inconvenient and recent research has shown that it might even promote poor nutrition.”
Some universities report that students are more likely to choose an entrée and a dessert, and skip a salad or healthy side option if