Food-Related Solutions at Ithaca College,Phase2 Architecture and Clark University: Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference

In a combined session on dining and food-related initiatives, we heard about architectural gardening, food sourcing and composting. Here's the breakdown:

Lacy Brittingham from Phase2 Architecture (AIA, LEED-AP)
Lacy started with the excellent point that food is a great way to reach people. After all, everybody eats! Considering that agriculture is the greatest nonpoint source of water pollution, and that with most foods, nutritional content seems to decrease as production grows, incorporating food into sustainability is a no-brainer.

Phase2 Architecture's Enviro-Center attempts to address this problem by integrating office space with agricultural. The building, now in renovation, is considered "regenerative" office space, in that healthy food is grown within the upper halls of an office building. Office-workers are only a floor away from a sustainable, organic food source, and the building features closed loops for water and waste systems.

The idea of urban farming is not new (community gardens, this Japanese underground farm, hydroponic barges, indoor/balcony container gardens, etc), but this is a technique I haven't seen before. Imagine walking upstairs to make yourself a lunchtime salad! I wonder how campuses can use similar models on a grander scale to help reconnect students and campus staff to green space through symbiotic systems. Anybody know of any campuses who are building similar installations?




Jeff Scott: Director of Dining Services at Ithaca College (new motto: Sustainable. Healthy. Fresh.)
Ithaca College has made a large effort towards sustainability with both institutional and student support. For example, in one residential dining hall, the university started a "Fresh Food Market" with as many organic, free-range, seasonal and local products as possible. Students go through a serving line as usual, but have more options of food sources. To manage this effort, Ithaca also added a new chef who works on the menus to increase quality of food, and chats with students in line to help them choose sustainable and healthy options. This particular hall feeds about 20,000 people per year, and also composts food waste and uses compostable grab-and-go packaging, which results in about 371 tons of scraps being composted per year.

I was particularly impressed by a partnership between a student organization and the Dining Services that compensated for the higher cost of fair-trade, organic coffee by creating an education campaign to control portion size and post nutrition information. The reduction in food costs made up for the more expensive coffee, and also decreased the amount of leftover food waste.

In the catering department, there's a zero-waste catering plan, which is implemented through a compost system for food waste and compostable serveware. Last year's campus picnic, due to the compostable tableware, was labeled as completely zero-waste. Menus are also tweaked to be made as sustainable as possible.

Jeff closed with a few issues that are still being addressed, such as a discount at campus coffeeshops for reusable mugs and the difficulty of knowing the carbon impact of food when vendors do a lot of the sourcing. Does anyone have any experience with that? Please make use of the comments section!



Dave Schmidt, Composting at Clark University
Unfortunately, my laptop fritzed during Dave's presentation so I lost my notes, but I'm sure if you asked him he'd send you his report. Clark instituted a fairly large-scale effort to compost both food and non-food waste on campus, using a third-party composting facility, with pretty good results. Click here for more details.

Wrap-up
In the after-session comments, we discussed how much complexity these issues entail. For example, many in the sustainable movement try to source food as locally as possible, but life-cycle estimates for some products mean that they can actually be grown more efficiently and at a lower resource/CO2 cost in another country, even taking the shipping cost into account. While the Enviro-Center by Phase2 Architecture grows its own produce inside the building, and can therefore control the water and fertilizer usage of its crops which mitigates those effects somewhat, some products will still need to be imported, and life-cycle cost calculators are still developing.


**I'm Xarissa Holdaway from the Campus Ecology team at the National Wildlife Federation. I'm live-blogging the UMD Smart and Sustainable Campuses Conference, and will be checking in every few hours over the next two days to tell you what I'm learning. Please forgive any spelling/grammar typing mistakes, I'm doing this on the fly and will be returning to edit later!