Grab a plate, fork and knife this Tuesday, but forget the tray because Trayless Tuesdays are here to stay in the Towers Dining Hall.

 

After a successful test run on Campus Sustainability Day, Oct. 22, Ithaca College Dining Services has decided to do away with the tray every Tuesday for the rest of the semester. Nov. 4 marked the first official Trayless Tuesday at the Towers.

 

Jeffrey Scott, general manager for Ithaca College Dining Services, said the college is joining an initiative that is already being implemented on campuses across the country.

 

"Trayless dining is something that honestly a number of colleges have started doing now for years, to reduce the amount of food waste, to help motivate, or make it a little bit easier for people to be conscious of how much food they're eating," Scott said.

 

The weekly program is an effort to reduce the amount of food being wasted in the dining hall, something Scott said is a main concern for dining service staff.

 

"Unfortunately for people in Ithaca food services, we see the waste everyday and so anything done positively to help reduce that waste, consciously, they're in to trying," he said.

 

Marian Brown, Special Assistant to the Provost, said she is excited the dining services have begun to start doing some influential tests.

 

"It's not just about food waste," she said. "We're trying to get a sense of what impact this would have on actual energy and resource use."

 

She said while these reasons seem the most obvious, the weekly program will also allow students to make conscious decisions about what they are eating.

 

Dining services now have student voices on their staff in the form of three sustainability interns. Scott said the interns have been a beneficial addition to Ithaca Dining Services, collecting data, doing research, and most importantly producing feedback.

 

"They're students, they’re customers, they're the folks using our services," he said. "They're able to give feedback in a different way than I am in my position."

 

Sophomore Stephanie Piech, one of the interns, said when Scott brought the idea of Trayless Tuesdays up, she gladly took the project on and began doing some research on trayless dining on college campuses.

 

"The only way you're going to find out if people like something or dislike something, is to just test it out," she said.

 

Piech said Trayless Tuesdays will show that the college's environmental initiatives are reflected in every aspect of campus, including dining.

 

"I think that doing something like this shows that dining services is apart of Ithaca's sustainability initiative," she said. "It just brings awareness to the everyday person."

 

According to Sodexho's website, the college’s food service provider, hundreds of colleges have forgone the use of the tray in their campus dining halls.

 

Scott said the college's dining services have been considering going trayless for many years, but it wasn't until they connected with interested students, that the idea start to gain some support. Student organizations committed to sustainability on campus, like Ithaca College Environmental Society, were what made the initiative doable.

 

Scott said after a semester or more collecting data and feedback about its impact, his goal would be to have Towers become permanently trayless.

 

"I'd like to think that we could go full speed with Trayless towers, whether it be the end of the semester, next semester, maybe sooner, who knows," he said. "[But] we really want that feedback and direction from our students…it's their dining hall.”