Project Proposal

During my days at UCLA and at the Deneve dorms, I would always eat at the Deneve dining hall and experience the mass chaos of hundreds of other starving students collecting together to furiously eat all they could eat and gather around tables as quickly as possible. At the end of my meal, I, as well as other students, would collect our trays and place them on the turning tray collectors for the people in the kitchen to clean and dispose of uneaten waste. However, as I always put my tray in the tray collectors, I was always intrigued at how the Deneve dining hall staff would handle all the excess food waste and liquids that the students didn't consume. Did the staff just simply throw all the waste away, or was there some sort of sustainable practice that the staff use while throwing away the waste. In essence, my project will cover the ways the Deneve Dining hall staff practice sustainability, and, if they do practice sustainability, the ways in which such waste can be, or is, reused for either the benefit of the enviroment, or for the benefit of the school, and the different ways in which such waste is collected. In addition, I will also be examining the ecological footprint of the Deneve Dining hall and see if such a footprint has a major impact, both negatively or positively, on the enviroment and comparing such a footprint to the ordinary American.

There will be multiple procedures and ways in which I will examine whether the Deneve Dining Hall practice sustainability. The first way will be whether the dining hall do infact practice sustainability and how such waste, food, liquid, napkins, etc, are collected and thrown away. I will show the ways in which the dining hall collect such waste by creating a trash inventory of just a simple, ordinary day for the staff at the dining hall and see whether there is a form of sustainability seen in such a way. The second way will be to calculate the ecological footprint of the dining hall and compare with a simple ordinary American and see which wastes more in one day. The third, and final , procedure will be to examine ways in which the dining hall could improve sustainability efforts, if none are seen, or by just improving on modern practices.