The Colby Echo

Issue date: 5/4/07 Section: News

On Mar. 1, Dining Services at the College implemented a program in which students were given plastic mugs they could take out of the dining halls in hopes that they would return them and use them in lieu of paper cups to reduce trash. Recently, this environmentally sound idea has had less than desirable returns, as most of the mugs have not wound up coming back to the dining halls at all, and instead can be found scattered about campus in dorm rooms or forgotten about on the side of the road.

Operations Manager of Dining Services Joe Klaus has noticed fewer and fewer of the mugs in the dining halls. "We don't see any large numbers in any one place at any given time," he said. He estimated that of the 3,000 mugs Sodexho (the company the College uses to provide dining services) bought, probably about one hundred of them are still in circulation, and even that might be high. "I don't view the program as a failure though."

Klaus said that like any other form of education, the program will take time. "I'm not overly displeased," he said. It will take time to reverse a student's psychology that he or she can just count on disposable drinking vessels being there at all times. "We're trying to re-teach that. And that's going to take a while." Part of the reason the program began is because students tended to walk off with china mugs that were more costly to replace than their newer plastic substitutes. Dining Services has offered free breakfast to custodians who return ten mugs from their residence halls.

Regardless of the program's success or failure this year, Klaus is confident that it will improve next year. Dining Services plans to give the program a shot in the arm with a fresh shipment of mugs and a new blitz of information to publicize the movement.

"My hopes out of all this is that at the end of four years of college, I've sent a student out into the world who has developed the habit of not using a disposable product and throwing it away. If I can develop that over a four year period I think I've accomplished something," Klaus said.

Students are also getting behind the effort of evaluating what can be done to improve the program. Plans are in the works for a meeting between Dining Services and the Environmental Awareness Group to examine how initiatives like the reusable mugs and "Trayless Thursdays" can get off the ground.

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