University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Thursday, October 18, 2018
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DAILY CARDINAL HOUSING GUIDE
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Wavering graduation rates worry campuses By Robyn Cawley COLLEGE NEWS EDITOR
GRAPHIC BY MAGGIE LIU
Gordon Dining is implementing new policies after finding that leftover food was being wasted.
Even though the school-age population has increased, the number of high school graduates has decreased over the past few years. UW System campuses are eager to combat this, but some feel that their efforts are not enough. For Wisconsin students ages five to 17, there was a decline from 981,000 in 2010 to 962,500 in 2015. There is likely to be an increase to 1,012,500 in 2035. The net gain throughout the next 30 years will be around 2.7 percent. However, students pursuing post-
secondary education is decreasing nationwide. In the 2012-’13 academic year, 70.9 percent of students who graduated went on to college. In 2016’17, the number of students decreased to 55.2 percent, resulting in a loss of more than 15 percent. “This significant decline in enrollment was a major factor in UW System’s decision to restructure,” said Director of Strategic Communications Heather LaRoi. Over the summer, the UW System committed to merging their two- and four-year campuses. The current aca-
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Dining halls dish out new waste strategies By Kalli Anderson STAFF WRITER
Walking into Gordon Dining & Event Center, you are inundated with smells of omelettes, burgers and stir fry. As you pull out your Wiscard to pay, a fresh waffle on your plate, you wonder, “where do all those ingredients go at the end of the night?” Thirty to 40 percent of food in America is wasted, which translates to 218.9 pounds of food per person each year, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. But at UW-Madison, Gordon Dining Hall is implementing practices that may help conserve food. Seven percent of trash on campus was recyclable, nearly half was compostable and 28 percent of the recycling should have been in the garbage, according to a trash audit conducted by Office of Sustainability student staff in February 2017. Management at Gordon responded by training employees on how to properly dispose of trash. A month after teaching staff the new methods, student staff at the Office of Sustainability did another trash audit which found that only 2 percent of the trash was recyclable, 4 percent was compostable and 7.5 percent of the recycling should have been in the trash. Since these audits, Gordon has worked to become more waste conscious. By taking away trash cans and recycling bins from the building and adding a conveyor belt, students can no longer throw away entire trays of food. Instead,
employees sort the food waste throughout the day and at the end of the night. “If a product can be reused, we reuse it. If a product cannot be reused but donated, we donate it,” said Director of Dining and Culinary Services for University Housing Peter Testory. Gordon makes major changes to strategies and management Gordon switched from sending trash to the UW-Madison agricultural research station to a local digester in Middleton. The machine sorts out contamination, recycles food and separates out organics. All organic material goes into large tanks that heat to over 100 degrees and digests the materials. Methane is released as a byproduct that is captured and transferred over to the local grid at Madison Gas & Electric to produce electricity. Solid byproduct is sold to farmers as compost. Gordon has been able to clean up its waste stream and allow for the digester to sell the end-result solid byproduct to local farmers. Without cleaning up the waste stream and leaving bits of contamination in the compost, this switch to a digester would not have been able to occur. “You can’t be growing things with bits of plastic,” said University Housing Sustainability Coordinator Breana Nehls. When consumers were responsible for themselves, almost 30 percent of the waste streams had contamination and would have rendered the solid byproduct useless. A large part of the contamination
came from the compostable to-go boxes Gordon formerly used. After identifying this problem, Gordon, along with all UW-Madison dining halls, switched to using to-go tokens. The coins are turned in at the cash register for a plastic to-go box, which students will later return at the entrance of Gordon in a machine that then dispenses another token. The system has a return rate of 400 to 500 containers per day at the Gordon location. “The ticket-to-takeout is providing a more sustainable way for people to take things on their way to go,” Nehls said. Gordon also updated its management style last spring. Certain employees focus solely on how much food is used, the amount left over and amount produced, which all determine how much food dining halls order, according to Testory. “We check everything, down to the amount of parmesan cheese that was used by folks putting parmesan on their pizza,” he said. Before donating, Gordon determines if the food will be safe for organizations to reuse by considering aspects like whether or not the food was available for self-service. Unable to guarantee whether or not a food has been contaminated by sick customers, Gordon follows Industry Best Practice and refrains from donating items from the salad bar and other self-service areas. “Our number one priority is quality and making sure the food is safe and good to eat the next time,” Testory said. “We may take mari-
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TÉALIN ROBINSON/THE DAILY CARDINAL
Student org hands out buttons on campus to promote self-love.
Student org aims to spread body positivity on campus By Jenna Walters CAMPUS NEWS EDITOR
UW-Madison’s National Organization for Women celebrated Love Your Body Day with campus activities, which included hosting a speaker who addressed self-love and feminism. For nearly 20 years, NOW has celebrated body positivity on Oct. 17. In order to spread the message, the UW-Madison chapter handed out goodie bags filled with buttons, affirmations and information about NOW on Library Mall. Later in the evening, it hosted Gender & Women’s Studies Professor Katherine Phelps. Phelps talked about beauty standards in today’s society, as well as what it means to love the body and the institutions that constrain it. She explained that the practice of today’s feminism lacks an equality of intersecting identities and encouraged the audience to challenge the social constructs around femininity that give some bodies value and others none. “The problem isn’t femininity — It’s the value we put on it,” Phelps said. She also discussed how people in today’s culture are often told the
phrase “love your body” but aren’t given the proper tools to do so. Laura Livermore, co-leader of the UW-Madison NOW chapter, said this is why the organization hosted Phelps. “A huge part of feeling safe and comfortable is loving your own body and knowing there are others who can help you with that,” she said. “We celebrate to help reiterate we’re in solidarity with everyone here on campus.” Livermore added that NOW celebrates Love Your Body Day to create an inclusive environment for those wanting to strengthen and practice self-love. “Our organization focuses on spreading positivity and empowerment, especially between women and other marginalized communities,” she said. “We are an intersectional, feminist group here on campus and we want to create a safe space for people.” According to Livermore, the events hosted by the organization garnered a lot of positive feedback and they hope to have more events in the near future to spread the importance of loving the body for everything it is.
“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”