Suffield Academy Excels at Food Scrap Collection

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As of early January, Suffield Academy had collected over 360,000 pounds of food waste since its program began in September 2019, according to Blue Earth Compost. The Hartford firm helps manage the prep school’s initiative and hauls away the food scraps. The Academy serves three meals seven days a week.

The food scraps from the Academy go to anaerobic digesters on farms in Massachusetts and Vermont, as do the scraps collected by the town and public schools. The digesters mix the food scraps with cow manure to create renewable natural gas, liquid organic fertilizer and animal bedding. So the food scraps don’t decay in landfills and create dangerous, heat-trapping methane gas.

Photo by Tony Peterson
Suffield Academy’s food service director, Sean Hennessey, with some of the school’s empty and cleaned food scrap recycling containers.

How it started

The Academy’s food service director, Sean Hennessey, said the food scrap recycling program “was really student-driven from the beginning.” Before 2019, various groups had tried collecting and composting food on campus, but the volume was unwieldy, and students didn’t have time to manage it. They then helped develop today’s food scrap collection process. “We had a group of kids here that really put some effort into figuring out how we could do it efficiently,” said Hennessey.

Careful collection monitoring

There’s only one dining room on campus, serving up to 600 students, faculty and employees three meals daily. Two faculty members sit with eight students at each table during four lunches weekly to eat family-style. The intent is to build camaraderie among students from different grades and teach manners, said Hennessey. A school-supplied green food recycling bucket sits in the middle of the table. After finishing their meals, students drop uneaten food into the bins under the watchful eye of faculty before bringing their trays to the dish room. “To have the students scraping their own plates into the buckets and seeing what they’re wasting has really made an impact,” noted Hennessey.

When faculty don’t dine with the students, students eat buffet style. There’s no green bin on the table. When done eating, students take their trays to the dish room, put their utensils, glasses and plates into dishwashing racks and leave everything else on the tray. Kitchen staff toss the trash, recyclables and food scraps into separate barrels, eliminating possible food scrap contaminants like ice cream sandwich wrappers mistakenly thrown in by students. Salad bar and prep cooks in the kitchen also collect their food scraps. The staff rolls filled barrels onto a loading dock. When Blue Earth Compost arrives twice weekly, it empties, washes and lines the recycling bins with new plastic bags.

Another way Suffield Academy reduces waste is by issuing every student a YETI mug at the beginning of the school year. Staff encourages them to use the mugs to minimize paper cup usage when taking out food.

The challenge of helping sizes

A 31-year Academy employee, Hennessey is proud and slightly disappointed with the school’s food scrap recycling effort. Sure, it’s kept 180 tons of food from the landfill. But, he feels that educating diners on the proper portions to take so they’re not throwing away uneaten food is another challenge.Based on his success, and with help from the Academy’s environmentally-minded students and staff, I think he’ll figure out ways to minimize that issue.

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