While the rest of us continue to scrape snow and ice this week, students at Penn are adding on a different kind of scraping.
All week in the three student dining facilities, they're being asked to scrape the leftover food from their plates into large containers that will be measured each day to track the amount of food waste over the course of a week.
Food waste is never a good thing, of course. But few of us -- other than my mom -- are perfect about cleaning our plates. So the next best thing is to compost the leftovers. Penn sends its food waste to an industrial composting facility in Wilmington. Whereas backyard composters have to stick to veggie matter -- no meat or oils -- this place can take just about anything, from bones to corncobs.
The plan is that the "Scrape Bucket Challenge" will highlight the environmental impacts of food waste and encourage students to waste less.
The amounts will be calculated as part of Penn's tally in RecycleMania, a nationwide competition among colleges and universities -- more than a dozen in this area alone -- to see which can reduce waste the most and recycle the most.
GreenSpace - her column about how to reduce your carbon footprint in everyday life - appears every other Monday in Health & Science.
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