I’m glad people are thinking about going trayless. ’Cause it’s a high-impact way of reducing waste, saving on labor and associated costs, and reducing water and chemical use.
Huh? Read Emily Nonko’s The Case of the Vanishing Cafeteria Tray. Writes Nonko:
The idea of trayless dining took off at college campuses in the U.S. a little over a decade ago. By 2009, 42 percent of colleges and universities tracked by the Sustainable Endowments Institute had begun curbing the use of trays in their dining halls. Just three years later, 75 percent of the tracked schools had eliminated trays in some or all of their dining facilities.
And it gets better:The wave of data following the introduction of trayless dining proved the effort has real impact. An Aramark Higher Education study found that out of 186,000 meals served at 25 colleges and universities over the course of an academic year, trayless days saw a 25 to 30 percent reduction in food waste per person.
Switching topics, let’s talk alcohol. Virginians craft a plan to boost farmers while reducing beers’ carbon footprint leads with the obvious: “While savoring their preferred craft beer, most Virginians likely aren’t calculating the beverage’s carbon footprint.” The effort is designed to reduce reliance on grain from as far away as Canada and give farmers a reason to grow higher revenue crops.
Appalachian Grains is doing the heavy lifting on the math and economic versatility that comes with growing local grains for locally-made brews. Learn more in Cultivating a new economy in Southwest:
Barley isn’t new to Lucas Rector.
His family has a couple of hundred acres of the small grain planted as a cover crop on their Washington County farm; they’ll harvest it in the spring for hay.
But 10 particular acres that Rector planted in October represent a shift, for the farmer and potentially for the region: The barley grown on this plot will be malted for beer and spirits as part of a project aimed at helping diversify the economy of Virginia’s far Southwest corner, where coal and tobacco, once the economic heavyweights, have faded.
The takeaway from this effort is that change is possible and economically viable. Can farmers on the Northern Neck do more to reduce reliance on grain from afar?