Wooster dining has made great strides in creating a more sustainable and environmentally friendly campus.
Salad dressing, which used to come in individual packets, now comes in bulk, trays have been phased out and food waste from Kittredge and Lowry are sent to Quasar, an anaerobic digester on the OARDC campus that turns food waste into energy.
There is, however, one area where students and staff continually choose a v ery environmentally unfriendly option over a greener one: cups.
As you may have seen, all dining locations offer a reusable mug. This mug functions on the same carabineer system that takeout boxes use, using a gold clip to distinguish it from the green box clips. This mug is an alternative to paper or plastic, single use cups. Aside from being greener, they also offer a discount on the price of your drink.
Many students throw their paper or plastic cup into a recycling bin, believing that they haven’t done the worst thing for the environment, because at the end of the day they believe it will be recycled. They are wrong.
Neither is processed in Wayne County for two distinct reasons. Paper cups cannot be recycled because of a thin layer of low-density polyethylene that coats the inside of them, which is not removed (same with any type of granola bar wrapper that has a plastic outside and foil lining, etc). Plastic cups cannot be recycled because the ones that the college provides are compostable, making them an unusual type of plastic that is not handled here.
It is also important to understand that compostable cups will only breakdown if they are in an active compost pile, which a landfill is not. Every disposable cup on this campus will end up in a landfill, or worse: in the waterways.
Fortunately, there are options.
The first is to use the reusable mugs provided by the College, which can just as easily carry cold drinks as warm ones. You don’t have to wash them; if it breaks it is easily replaced and you don’t even have to physically carry the mug around. If it is not in use, just use the clip.
They aren’t the nicest, or the fanciest mugs in the world (who hasn’t had one leak mid-sip?), but they sure are significantly less wasteful.
Dining Services is also in the process of finding a new style of mug to replace those that have been lost or broken, so if you have any requests for new features, now is your chance.
For anyone who is more concerned about what type of mug carries their coffee, Amazon is a great option for finding your perfect mug. The bookstore also carries several mugs if you would like to maintain your school spirit.
Next time you get a drink to go, make sure to think about the fact that your cup will sit in a landfill until long after you are gone, and grab a reusable cup instead.
Madelaine Braver, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment at MBraver18@wooster.edu.