CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Every day in Top of Lenoir, hundreds of students line up at the conveyor belt to drop off plates piled high with unwanted pizza crusts, rejected pot roast and the last few bites of lima beans.
The plates stack up as they slowly rotate into the kitchen, disappearing from students’ sight and thought.
But the food on those plates doesn’t disappear.
In many cases, thrown-away food scraps are dumped in landfills and left to decompose anaerobically. This process produces the third-largest source of methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more impactful on climate change than carbon dioxide, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency.
But Carolina Dining Services dining halls divert 100 percent of that waste away from landfills — by turning it into compost.
“It’s about creating a new kind of product,” said Recycling and Composting Coordinator Natalia Posthill. “Though there are a lot of benefits to keeping these things out of the landfill.”
Composting, which breaks down organic material aerobically, serves to turn food waste into a nutrient-rich soil amendment that can be added to gardens.
At UNC, almost 650 tons of organic waste was composted in the 2013-14 fiscal year — including 281 tons from Lenoir and 258 tons from Rams Head Dining Hall, which together serve 8,600 meals per day. All Carolina Dining Services venues serve 20,000 meals per day total.
Food scraps are also composted from some of the other Carolina Dining Services locations, including Alpine Bagel Cafe, Wendy’s, the Beach Cafe and the Friday Center. UNC also has piloted a composting program now in six residence halls.
But it is clear there is room to improve. The 2013 Campus Sustainability Report said just 38 percent of UNC’s trash by weight was compostable. Carolina Dining Services doesn’t measure pre- and post-consumer composting separately at the all