Within my role as a sustainability student ambassador for dining services at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), I collaborate with fellow students, faculty, and organizations to create a more sustainable dining experience on campus. In order to reduce the amount of waste produced, I educate students on items that are compostable and on the environmental impact of food waste. I am also currently a member of the Minnesota Student Sustainability Network and gathered information through surveying the fellow student sustainability leaders at the various universities within this network.

In a typical year, I conduct research on the amount of waste produced by the dining center at UMD by weighing waste. Due to COVID-19, I pivoted my research and conducted research on waste management within dining services at various universities in Minnesota. I am interested in comparing how different universities handle waste management.

The methodology I employed was collecting data quantitatively through creating and conducting a survey regarding waste. This survey focused on general waste management in dining centers and looked at how COVID-19 has impacted waste. I hypothesized that a majority of universities in Minnesota utilize some kind of compost system in their dining facilities. I also suspected that many of these universities have increased single use to-go boxes due to COVID-19 which has led to an increase of waste. After data collection, I anticipated that I would discover that some universities have more opportunities to increase sustainability in waste management in dining facilities compared to other schools.

After analyzing data I discovered that the way Minnesota universities are educating and managing waste among dining facilities has changed due to COVID-19, some of it due to fewer students being on campus. I also found out that Universities have drastically decreased the amount of waste management education due to barriers created by COVID-19. Now that I am at the end of the research program, I will share the findings with the fellow Minnesota Student Sustainability Network and will discuss areas of improvement and practical solutions to increase sustainability within waste management in dining facilities.

• Over half of the participants surveyed feel the amount of campus waste has increased due to the pandemic.

• Almost half of participants reported that 80-99% of dining center items are compostable but none of the participants believed the dining items are actually being composted.

• The amount of food that is safe for consumption that went to nonprofits has decreased by over half.

• Over half of the participants reported a change to their school’s to-go box system during COVID-19.

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