A Raw Deal

By Simone Melvin and Syra Castillo | Podcast Editor and Staff Writer

At the end of a dinner rush, students carelessly toss plastic dishes onto the revolving conveyor belt in Umphrey Lee Dining Hall. A few plates arrive licked clean, but most glide along covered with half-eaten dinners. But for the first time, the compostable items on those dinners will avoid a less-than-green ending.

Since September 2022, members of the dining-hall staff have been separating viable food scraps, setting them aside for compost. This change went unnoticed by most, but composting on campus has been a change that students in SMU’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter have lobbied to bring to campus for year. SMU alumna Sofia Lara proposed the idea as a part of her Human Rights Fellowship in 2019 and spearheaded the initiative with Turn, a DFW-based environmental start-up. “This was six years in the making,” Lara said. “I honestly almost cried when we