One ton of food — equivalent to 2,000 full plates — was dumped by diners at Claremont McKenna College’s Collins Dining Hall last month, according to the college. The statistic comes as Collins enters its second semester of front-of-house composting, an effort spearheaded by the dining hall and student sustainability groups.
Alongside the plate waste, Collins saw nearly 750 pounds of compost through kitchen scraps, leading to a total of nearly two tons that were ultimately composted, according to the Roberts Environmental Center.
The composting effort came about in collaboration with the EcoReps, a student group that promotes sustainable practices on campus.
EcoRep Francesca Rossi CM ’27 played a key role in instating this system of composting at Collins. For her, the thousands of pounds of wasted food at the dining hall last month was a shocking number.
“We were only here [for] about half a month,” Rossi said. “[I]t’s kind of jarring to imagine how that would translate to full months and semesters.”
Philip Herrera, assistant general manager of Collins Dining Hall, said that the waste-management process from the dining hall is a collaboration between Bon Appétit, CMC’s Facilities Department and the City of Claremont.
“We compost as much as possible, pre-consumer and post-consumer, using the city-provided compost cans … which are then picked up by the City of Claremont waste management services,” Herrera wrote in a statement to TSL.
He said Collins has been in close collaboration with both the EcoReps and the CMC sustainability committee to raise awareness about reducing plate waste. He wrote that both student groups are “very much involved with the sustainability practices of the dining hall.”
EcoRep Carol Hutchinson CM ’26 wrote in a statement to TSL that while the sustainability group’s other initiatives have enacted small changes to dorm life and culture, the composting initiative felt more “concrete.”
Hutchinson also wrote that since Collins was the last dining hall at the 5Cs to have diners sort their food scraps into landfill and compost bins, the EcoReps helped combat perceptions of how the college prioritizes sustainability.
“We wanted to take initiative to combat the perception that CMC is not as environmentally conscious as some of the other 5Cs,” Hutchinson wrote.
But she explained that not only is the amount of food waste “a big problem,” but composting is still not completely efficient since many students mix up the bins for compost and landfill.
“It effectively renders the compost moot,” she wrote.
Angeline Hu CM ’28 said the labeling of the bins contributes to confusion, since one side of the conveyor belt has the compost bin on the right, while the other has the compost bin on the left.
“With the other dining halls, we’re all Pavlov-ed into assuming the compost is on the right,” Hu said. She noted that standardizing the bins would be “a low effort way to make things easier [and] faster.”
Despite these issues, Hutchinson wrote that the system is much better overall for both sustainability and dining hall workers, who no longer have to manually scrape hundreds of plates daily.
“It makes their jobs easier,” she wrote. “If we all do small actions individually, there is a collective benefit.”
The composting metrics from January were put on a poster in Collins this week, opposite the composting bins in the dining hall, alongside statistics on utensil usage. Elise Chin CM ’28 approved of the change.
“It’s good in informing students how much [waste] they’re producing,” she said. “I think students will be more conscientious.”
Rossi said she hopes future EcoRep initiatives continue to raise awareness and education about sustainability on campus.
“If we can get our classmates and peers more aware of how their actions may or may not be sustainable, then I think that’s a win.”