A Culture of Sustainability

Think a commitment to sustainability is too hard? Think again. David May (left) and Richard MacDonald of the University of New Hampshire put together a complex composting system to protect both their dollars and the environment.

By David May and Richard MacDonald, Guest Authors -- Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, 9/1/2007

David May Assistant Vice President, Business Affairs University of New Hampshire David.may@unh.edu

Richard P. MacDonald C.P.M., Assistant Director, UHS Support Services University of New Hampshire rpmd@maple.unh.edu

Sustainability represents one of the most prevalent buzzwords in today's foodservice industry. Foodservice operators and the suppliers serving them continue to look for ways to wrap their minds around this concept and apply it to their businesses in meaningful ways. While the notion of making a foodservice operation more sustainable may be a new one to many in our industry, it's something that we at the University of New Hampshire had to embrace out of necessity.

For public universities like ours, state funding plays a critical role in our financial stability. But when you look at the amount of money UNH receives from the state, we rank 50th in the United States among public universities, and it would take a 44-percent increase just to get to 49th. That's not a complaint; it's the reality of the situation. We offer this statistic as a glimpse into how we must approach managing our facilities. We are driven to incorporate new and innovative ideas into our facilities and operations.

Ten years ago, UNH was the first public university in the country with an endowed office of sustainability. Led by the university's director of sustainability, who has since been promoted to chief sustainability officer, one of the first partnerships this new department forged was with hospitality services. We in hospitality services made sustainability one of our core values shortly thereafter. We wanted to make it clear that we supported the university's objective of weaving sustainability into the campus fabric.

Members of the University of New Hampshire's hospitality services team scrape waste into a trough that has water flowing through it. During peak times, the university has as many as five people scraping trays. Once an associate dumps the food waste into the trough, the water takes the waste into a pulper, which grinds it up and squeezes it out through a screen, dropping the waste product into a 20-gallon container. The resulting material is of an oatmeal consistency with 80 percent of the liquid removed. The system recirculates the water through the trough and some make-up water is added to accommodate for any lost water.

As we began to create a sustainable culture, we did so with the intent of striking a balance between environmental, human and economic health. For us, it's a triangle with three equal sides. When evaluating sustainable initiatives, it is easy to focus exclusively on dollars and cents because being sustainable can be expensive. It is important to get beyond the short-term costs and look at the long-term benefits. Focus on the big picture.

One of the first ways we worked sustainability into our operation was to start a composting program. UNH is a landgrant university and as such it has an agriculture program through the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture. Under the direction of a faculty member, the university had a farm that was researching composting and its effect on crop production. To support those efforts, hospitality services started collecting pre-consumer waste and shipping it to Kingman Farm, two miles from the main campus. The waste product consisted of lettuce leaves, tomato cores and other items generated during the food preparation process. As the program evolved, we wanted to incorporate post-consumer waste. We added a small pulper to the dishroom of Huddleston Hall, at the time, the busiest of our three dining halls. When we had the opportunity to upgrade the dishrooms at our other dining halls, we added a pulper. We now have pulpers at all three dining halls and it's been this way for five years.

Of course, this process has changed a little with our operations. Today, we use more pre-cut or prepared items in our cooking process so our pre-consumer waste has declined considerably. The pre-consumer waste we do generate goes into 20-gallon yellow barrels in the prep kitchen.

The amount of post-consumer waste we process has increased significantly. At the beginning, this was a little challenging. Students had to separate their waste: one bucket for the food and paper, and one bucket for the bones, plastic wrappers and other waste. We wanted to create a more pleasant experience for our guests so we have added tray accumulators at two of our dining facilities and a conveyor to the third. The students now place their trays on a tray conveyor or accumulator that takes the trays to the back of the house, where staff scrape the waste into a trough that has water flowing through it. During peak times, we have as many as five people stripping trays.

Once an associate dumps the food waste into the trough, the water takes the waste into a pulper, which grinds it up and squeezes it out through a screen, dropping the waste product into a 20-gallon container. The resulting material is of an oatmeal consistency with 80 percent of the liquid removed. The system recirculates the water through the trough and some make-up water is added to accommodate for any lost water.

The University of New Hampshire's Rick MacDonald shows off the yellow 20-gallon drums that store pre-consumer (left) and post-consumer waste. The hospitality services staff store these barrels in a refrigerated trash cooler before shipping them to other campus facilities for composting.

Staff use a dolly to move the 20-gallon barrels into a refrigerated trash room. The only way this system will work for us is if we keep the pulped materials refrigerated, especially on those 90° days. We want to avoid any foul smells near our facilities. During the academic year, our busiest time, the barrels of pulped materials get picked up daily. When school's not in session, that number drops to three times a week. Also, to maintain sanitary conditions, we included a barrel-washing room in the design of Holloway Commons.

To get the barrels to the farm, Hospitality Services, the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture and UNH Facilities invested equally in a truck that hauls the waste.

Quantifying the savings of this process can be a challenge. The pulpers we buy can cost as much as $40,000 and the way the university distributes cost makes it difficult to measure the reduction in utility expenses. We did see a definite reduction in our hauling fees.

We really feel strongly that this program is right for our department, the campus and our guests and we feel strongly we are saving money. We know our facilities dump less into the waste stream compared to previous years and we save on sewer and water costs. We may not get direct payback but in the eyes of the community we generate a lot of good will. In the college and university foodservice arena, we are looked at as leaders in area of sustainability and that's a good thing.

Along the way, we have learned several lessons. From an operational point of view, make sure you select the equipment with the capacity to handle the volume your location regularly generates. For example, the pulper we installed in Holloway Commons was undersized and could not meet the demands of the business. (We misjudged the popularity of Holloway Commons and, therefore, underestimated the number of meals that would be served there.) That can cause backups and hinder the program's ability to be successful. So, it's important to work with someone that can help determine the right size for your operation.

In the beginning, we did not have enough magnets in the trough to catch any wayward flatware. When they get caught in the pulper, the machine gets jammed and you need to have a service tech come out to fix the problem. We've increased the number of magnets considerably since then.

Initially, sustainability efforts were perceived as creating more work by our staff. Once you bring them into the fold by including them in the decision-making process and letting them know what you are doing and why, it becomes embedded in your culture. After that, staff start providing good ideas that can further a program.

It is important to look beyond the kitchen as well. We are in the process of installing waterless urinals in our facilities and have installed 12 to date. Each urinal can save up to 45,000 gallons of water per year. The campus let us be the guinea pigs and now that they have seen a successful installation, campus designers have added waterless urinals to other building projects.

The University of New Hampshire has committed to developing automation systems and most campus buildings are outfitted with them. These systems control heating, air conditioning and ventilation to better manage usage and costs. We also continue to make lighting upgrades to operate more efficiently.

As you can see, we remain very committed to reducing the waste stream and managing the use of resources. This leads us to look for opportunities whenever we renovate or build new spaces. In fact, this summer we added a new dishwasher to Philbrook Dining Hall that reduces water consumption by as much as 60 percent. We are also installing a bulk oil system in Holloway Commons. Similar to bulk CO2, this on-demand system will pump oil to individual fryers from a central location. This offers a safety benefit in that employees will not have to handle hot oil anymore - a big selling point for us. From a green perspective, the oil will be delivered from a tanker truck to a central location eliminating the need for plastic containers and cardboard boxes that traditional 35# oil units are delivered in, thereby keeping all that material out of the waste stream.

While our campus and team remain committed to being good stewards of the earth, we also realize that we have a role to play in the overall success of the university. Hospitality services plays an important role in the recruitment and retention of students. We try to create an ambiance in our facilities comparable to a restaurant. All of our dining halls serve meals on high-end china and flatware in lieu of disposable ware. Paper napkins are the only disposable items we use. This helps UNH Dining create a quality restaurant-style experience while managing disposables costs and keeping materials out of the waste stream.

We hope this information is useful to any organization contemplating sustainable initiatives. Innovative thinking and a willingness to try new things are critical to creating a sustainability program, and clearly a cultural shift is needed to make it successful.