Students eating in Carmichael Dining Hall after spring break will find themselves without trays for three weeks, as Dining Services will conduct a pilot program to test the feasibility of removing trays from all dining halls.
Students in the Experimental College (ExCollege) class "Environmental Action: Shifting from Saying to Doing" started the trayless initiative as a class project to reduce Tufts' environmental footprint by cutting back on water used to clean the trays and by reducing food waste.
Dallase Scott, a graduate student in the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning program who co−teaches the class, explained that the latter goal was the main motivation behind the initiative.
"With all that said and done, there is still a huge amount of food waste," Scott said. "With trays, students have space to put as much food as they want. It takes energy to grow, prepare and distribute that food."
Students in the class last semester brought the idea to both the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate and Dining Services. Dining officials recently confirmed that the "trayless" initiative will after spring break undergo a short trial to help decide if it is logistically feasible to permanently implement across campus.
There have been mixed results with trayless projects at other universities, according to Director of Dining and Business Services Patti Klos.
"I've been aware for several years that other campuses have tried this initiative," Klos said. "Some schools have been successful, some not."
Klos added while the trayless initiative was helpful in showcasing the amount of interest among the student body, it could potentially create problems for Dining Services.
"From the dining services side, we are concerned about when students walk up to the tray return and need somewhere to put their dish," she said. "We can't create a bottleneck when students would have nowhere to put the dishes."
Members of the dining hall staff are concerned that the removal of trays could increase their workload, especially in terms of cleaning up.
"I … feel like it will cause more work for us because students will leave dishes on the tables," Sandy Lin, a member of the Carmichael staff, said. "Without the tray, students will just walk away."
The initiative has sparked a heated debate on campus, as students argued about the merits of implementing the initiative. Groups on Facebook.com in support of and against the initiative have sprung up and attracted extensive participation.
Klos noted the strong opinions on the subject.
"It could become a real sore point with students," she said. "We give you great food and don't like to mess around with that. Quite frankly, I don't know if we'll be able to overcome it or not."
This divide over removing trays from the dining halls is really part of a larger issue of how environmentalism affects daily behavior, according to senior Alex Shapiro, a member of the ExCollege class.
"At the end of the day, the tray is more of a symbol behind a principle that people are arguing over," he said.
Shapiro added that the class aimed to initiate an environmental campaign at Tufts, and the trayless project was chosen because it seemed to be the most feasible and effective idea.
"The issue we all agreed on and thought would have the most bang for our environmental buck was the trayless campaign," he said.
Tina Woolston, project coordinator at the Office of Sustainability, who co−taught the class, added that students in the class were also taught how to run social marketing campaigns, a skill that could be useful in the future.
"Students learned a lot about themselves and about how they can affect change in the world," Woolston said. "It was very empowering."
Shapiro echoed this sentiment, saying that the class was a good lesson in how to bring about concrete and tangible changes.
"The idea is to take all these environmental issues that look so daunting … and teach students how you actually can make a difference," he said.
The class, which focused on environmental literacy, social marketing, critical thinking, and social psychology, according to Woolston, created an open forum for environmental discussion.
"The class was an environment to question what was going on around us and an arena to discuss these issues," Shapiro said. "When you leave Tufts, you now have some tools you can actually use."
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This article originally incorrectly stated that the pilot program would last for 3 days, as opposed to 3 weeks. This mistake was corrected on March 8, 2010.
