The thing about waste

By Mierka Ross

Westhampton '10

Yes, it's true, Richmond: The school is going green. This includes the stickers above your light switch telling you to save power and the stickers on the bathroom mirror telling you to save water. D-Hall is full of energy for Trayless Fridays and waste compilation. It kind of makes you wonder how much is being wasted and who is doing the wasting.

The first question is being answered for us. In the past few weeks, in D-Hall alone, students have wasted more than 50,000 pounds of food. That's a number acquired through the weekly collection of the remainder of food on our plates. The mathematicians in the back room do some heavy-duty equations to figure out a function for waste of student food while the lackeys go to weigh the trash on massive scales that reek of last week's collection.

This doesn't even include the partly touched trays that dining services has to dispose of once they've been opened and handled by students.

More equations.

Every time I see the trashcans standing near our futuristic tray collector I have to wonder what exactly we are doing with all this live waste? Of course, it's deemed waste when we toss it in the trash can, but at that point, we can't really send it off to starving countries.

I wrote out a comment slip to D-Hall asking about the potential of a school compost pile. Our food would deteriorate over time, breaking down into a lovely organic compost for all the landscaping around campus. Surely, with the amount we have been wasting we would save loads of money on landscaping. The comment received two responses. The first was in blue, saying it was an interesting idea and would be considered. The second was in red stating that there is no room at this time.

In short, Richmond, we are shipping that food off to pile up with lots of other mixed trash in someone else's backyard, and we will continue spending on more food than you can eat and fertilizer for our grounds.

Apparently, it's not easy being green.