Bethel Goes Green

Mishawaka, IN—Re­cently, you may have no­ticed bright green boxes be­ing car­ried by stu­dents walk­ing across cam­pus; they are the new reusable to-go con­tain­ers for the Din­ing Com­mons. You may even be con­fused since last se­mes­ter Bethel was still us­ing the old dis­pos­able Sty­ro­foam con­tain­ers. So, why the change? Weren’t those do­ing the job? In a sense, yes, there was noth­ing wrong with how they held food; and yet, some­thing was still off.  

If you have been watch­ing the news lately, you have likely been bom­barded with pro­pa­ganda from both sides of the en­vi­ron­men­tal de­bate. I of­ten get frus­trated at the sheer quan­tity of mes­sages hurled at us as con­sumers. Grow­ing up in a very con­ser­v­a­tive com­mu­nity my­self, my ini­tial in­cli­na­tion is to dis­credit the pro­po­nents of en­vi­ron­men­tal con­sid­er­a­tion and cli­mate change; how­ever, be­ing a sci­ence ma­jor here at Bethel, I have been able to study the world with ed­u­cated eyes and I see that we have a prob­lem. 

What does this have to do with how stu­dents ate get­ting food-to-go? For the past year or so, Jim Metherd, the head of food ser­vices, has been try­ing to find a way to re­duce the trash waste and the ex­pen­di­ture the din­ing com­mons gen­er­ates. This past year, I was able to work in the din­ing com­mons and had the op­por­tu­nity to per­son­ally work with him to bring about a pos­i­tive change. This change, al­though po­ten­tially less con­ve­nient at times, mas­sively re­duces the plas­tic waste Bethel pro­duces; ad­di­tion­ally, it saves thou­sands of dol­lars each se­mes­ter by not hav­ing to buy new dis­pos­able con­tain­ers on a con­tin­ual ba­sis. 

I was very ex­cited to see how the cam­pus re­sponded to the ini­tial push for the reusable con­tain­ers. When try­ing to ob­tain sig­na­tures, the stu­dent body far sur­passed the re­sponse I had hoped. This was in­stru­men­tal in mak­ing the change, but it also made me think. If most of the stu­dents and fac­ulty were so pos­i­tive about this change, what other ar­eas could we im­prove? How was Bethel do­ing in other ar­eas? What were we do­ing well? What could we maybe do bet­ter? 

Dr. Katie Weak­land, As­so­ci­ate Pro­fes­sor of Bi­ol­ogy and a staunch lover of the en­vi­ron­ment, was quite pleased with the switch. When I asked her about other ar­eas where Bethel did well, she was quick to re­spond by say­ing Bethel min­i­mizes pa­per waste ef­fec­tively. Dig­i­tiz­ing courses and class­work with Can­vas has con­sid­er­ably re­duced pa­per con­sump­tion and waste. The pa­per con­sump­tion that does oc­cur is mit­i­gated by the re­cy­cling the pro­fes­sors do them­selves.  

I asked Weak­land about what we could be do­ing bet­ter and about pos­si­ble next steps.  

“We need to com­post,” Weak­land said. “There is no rea­son for food to go into the trash.” 

 Com­post­ing, though it seems odd, would pro­vide nu­tri­ent-dense soil for land­scap­ing pro­jects and for Bethel’s gar­dens. It might even pro­vide a source of in­come in fu­ture years be­cause com­post soil can be sold.  

Weak­land also be­lieves Bethel can do more to im­prove their re­cy­cling. 

“All alu­minum and steel cans should be re­cy­cled,” Weak­land said. “There is no point in throw­ing them away when they can be re­cy­cled or reused.” 

As a stu­dent, some of these changes may seem un­nec­es­sary or dif­fi­cult to ac­com­plish be­cause we don’t con­trol much of the re­cy­cling or dis­posal op­tions on cam­pus. How­ever, we were able to come to­gether and change how Bethel of­fered food-to-go; we made our cam­pus more eco-friendly to­gether. What stops us from tak­ing the next steps? What stops us from not only mak­ing Bethel green through reusable food con­tain­ers but also bet­ter­ing the world around us?