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Cafeteria trays vanishing from colleges in effort to save food
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At some colleges, the trays disappeared overnight without students really noticing. But many university officials made an effort to involve students in the decision and inform the campus of impending tray bans.
At Virginia Tech, administrators recruited the student government and campus environmentalists to help. It started as an Earth Week experiment during the 2008 spring semester, when student volunteers weighed the amount of food waste in dining halls with and without trays. Without trays, students wasted 38 percent less food. By summer, the trays were gone in the two main dining halls on campus, D2 and Shultz.
Despite intense advertising and the popularity of anything portrayed as Earth-friendly, some Tech students were upset when the trays disappeared.
At the time, Alex Shamy was a freshman pledge at his fraternity. His older brothers were not happy and ordered the entire house to fill out as many complaint cards as possible every time they ate in D2.
"When I go to D2, my goal is to eat as much as possible," said Shamy, now a junior majoring in public and urban affairs. Without a tray, "you can only get one plate and a cup."
Tech isn't the only campus where there was tray-related grumbling.
The president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania made a number of budget cuts last school year, including getting rid of premium cable in the dorms and removing the red trays imprinted with the school seal from the cafeteria.
The senior class was especially upset, complaining all the way up to graduation day. So to reward them for their pain, President William Durden presented each graduate with a "decades-old Dickinson College cafeteria tray" along with a diploma.
"Seriously, this thing has been stolen by many students over many years," Durden deadpanned to the commencement crowd, "but you are going to get it honestly because you fought for it."