Photo by Tanaha Simon
At the beginning of this semester, I approached the General Manager of Dining Services, Mike Kmec, about the possibility of implementing a reusable mug system in the dining halls at Connecticut College. Similar systems have been created at Bates and Hamilton Colleges to decrease paper waste. At Bates, mug disposal-bins are placed in areas with heavy foot-traffic (in our case, Harris, Cro and certain residence halls) and Physical Plant collects the mugs and brings them back to the dining hall to be washed.
After some research, Kmec concluded that the endeavor would not be possible without outside funding and a committed student staff. He told me via e-mail, “I do however have good news. Dining Services plans on removing paper cups from the dining halls at some point soon in order to reduce our paper waste.”
A few weeks later in an e-mail addressed to the entire campus, Kmec announced that paper cups would be removed from all dining halls on March 1. He encouraged students to voice their opinions through e-mails or messages on the Dining Services Facebook group. More than a few students asked about implementing the Bates system, to which Kmec responded with the same answer he gave me.
While sustainable endeavors by our dining hall are commendable, I don’t believe the removal of paper cups is sustainable without a sustainable replacement. Students use paper cups to take snacks like cereal or yogurt out of the dining hall. Sure, this violates the official dining policy that prohibits students from taking more than a piece of fruit, a dessert or a beverage. But let’s be honest: this policy is regularly broken and rarely enforced. The paper cups are both convenient and easily accessible.
It’s true that convenience alone isn’t enough to justify 5,000 pounds of paper cup waste per semester. In the College-wide endeavor to become more environmentally friendly, removing excessive waste is necessary. However, Dining Services needs to anticipate that students will inevitably replace paper cups with the next available alternative, resulting in increased theft of plastic tumblers.
Surely, one motivation for the removal of paper cups is financial: Dining Services will save money. But buying reusable mugs is a one-time expenditure, plus the small cost of either Physical Plant or a student staff to collect and re-distribute the mugs. Kmec’s email to the campus community noted that 300 reusable mugs will be given out on March 2, after paper cups are officially gone. Instead of giving them away, shouldn’t they be donated as a foundation for the reusable mug system?
The cleaning and distributing of mugs will prove more difficult here than at Bates, which only has one dining hall, compared to our five. I propose that mugs be washed in Harris and JA, because of their size and location on campus, and distributed to the rest of the dining halls from there. Student staff or Physical Plant could collect from drop-off stations on a bi-weekly basis, or more often depending on the popularity of the program. The system would be based on reciprocity: mugs are clean and available for students, provided that students return them regularly.
Mug-theft could be a concern, but students have no incentive to keep mugs in their rooms to dry encrusted with old drink stains if they can drop them off and have them cleaned at no charge. Our College’s design places most of us in single rooms without kitchens. Countless mugs containing coffee remnants sit on my desk, begging to be cleaned in spare minutes that will never come. Truthfully, I’m much more likely to drop my mug off in the bin in Cro and pick up a clean one in Harris than I am to spend time washing my own mugs.
As if to mitigate any student backlash, Kmec implied in his email that we asked for this. And he’s right. What’s becoming more clear about Conn’s push for sustainability is that we want to be sustainable, but when it comes to changes that will impact our lives in a negative way, we are reluctant to see them go.
Instead of complaining about the removal of paper cups for a few weeks before we forget about it, we should advocate a better solution. It’s time to realize that our College may not have the resources to live up to the sustainable ideal we crave, so school endeavors need to be supplemented by student efforts. A student-created, reusable mug system is the first step in the right direction.
This (Bates model) plan is a good fit with Conn’s increasingly environmentally sustainable (but not nearly there yet) approach, but there’s a glaring omission in these conversations.
Why not form a group of interested students (or sub-group of an environmental club on campus) to initiate discussions with the Physical Plant and/or Dining Services staff, who are clearly also involved in this issue, and who should also be involved in the decision-making process.
Students and managers alone are not enough to truly change the way things are run and improve them in the long run.
I don’t really see the difference between this “reusable mug system” and what the de facto system is, if one chooses to avoid paper cups – appropriating the plastic cups for our own use. Like the proposed mug system, the ideal is to borrow the cup while we need it to transport a beverage or snack, and then return it to a dining hall to be washed and be used by someone else when we’re done with it. In reality, and as it would likely turn out if we had reusable mugs, we forget to return them, and they grow moldy in our room or get lost. Dining Services recognizes this is a problem and attempts to get us to remember to return them through “amnesty days.”
I don’t believe students would be any more likely to remember to return these mugs than the other cups, bowls and spoons we borrow, and the result would be extra cost – I’m sure these mugs would be more expensive to replace than the cups we currently misapropriate. I think encouraging students to bring their own mugs, facilitated by a one-time promotional distribution of mugs, would be more efficient, even though we’d have to walk to the bathroom or pantry to wash these mugs ourselves, but we’d have the incentive of ownership to care for our mugs, rather than disposing of communal mugs.
The one-time distribution of reusable mugs apparently occurred, but 300 was not nearly enough. If Dining Services would really like the use of mugs to be accepted as an alternative, these reusable to-go cups would need to be made available to the entire campus. As it is, I don’t personally know anyone who got one, and I’ve not even seen one. If I had one, I’d use it, but as it is it’s easy to understand why hundreds of mugs have gone missing in the last week.