The United States dumps approximately 33.5 million tons of food waste into landfills each year, according to the Sierra Club.

ISU Dining Services does what it can to avoid participating in this statistic. Dining centers on campus compost as much food waste as possible.

“In the dining centers, whatever can’t be eaten by somebody gets put into a bin and is composted,” said Brittney Rutherford, program coordinator for campus dining services. “Anything that comes down the dish line will go through a pulper.”

Rutherford described the pulper as an industrial garbage disposal that grinds up food waste from the dish line or the non-edible parts of different foods, such as banana peels, apple cores, melon rinds, and gets dumped into a bucket.

“It’s a mealy substance that comes out,” Rutherford said. “It’s a very dense, heavy product. Once you grind all that [food] up, it’s pulp. That’s sent out to the compost bin and it’s taken away to be composted.”

For the most part, everything from all four dining centers — Union Drive Marketplace, Seasons, Conversations and Storms — and the commissary kitchen located north of the towers is able to be composted.

Different situations apply to the marketplaces, where dining services can’t control where the food goes once students buy items such as boxed sandwiches, salads or sides.

Rutherford said Iowa State composts both what is called pre- and post-consumer food waste. Pre-consumer food waste includes items that cannot be eaten but can be composted, such as melon rinds, banana peels, carrot tops and chicken bones. Post-consumer examples might be what students leave on their plates through the dining center dish lines.

“We’re very fortunate here on campus to have a compost facility,” Rutherford said. “It’s really cool to be able to work with them. [The compost] goes out there, it turns back into compost and they put it back on campus. It really goes full circle.”

Once composted, the material comes out looking and feeling almost like dirt. The substance then is used on different gardening or construction projects across campus and is not available to the public.

“It’s a great outlet for our food waste,” Rutherford said.

Prior to the compost facility construction in 2008, food was tossed into the garbage.

“We didn’t have a place for it to go,” Rutherford said.

Jason Holesha, sophomore in aerospace engineering, works at Union Drive Marketplace and is sometimes in charge of running the pulp bins out to the compost bin.

“We usually dump one of these [about 30 gallon buckets] every 10 to 15 minutes,” Holesha said of a typical busy dinner at UDM. “I probably ran out three times in the past half hour or so. And that’s just me. We’ll [usually] have three other guys take it out.”

In 2010, the ISU Compost Facility reported that 333 tons of compost, both pre- and post-consumer, was brought to the facility from dining hall and kitchen food wastes. In 2011, the tonnage increased to 367, and it increased again to 372 tons in 2012.

In addition to composting food wastes, dining facilities monitor food waste levels, menu options, time of year. They are also constantly renovating recipes.

Cooks notice more food coming through the dish line during the beginnings of semester due to new and returning students trying out the halls’ recipes. Dining halls generally prepare for a smaller crowd toward the end of weeks before breaks, for example, to reduce food waste at the end of the day.

Iowa State has other initiatives in place, such as a collaboration with Food at First, an Ames-based free meal program for Story County residents in need; the ISU BioBus, a student initiative to recycle vegetable oil waste from dining facilities into biodiesel to help power CyRide buses; and going trayless in the dining halls.

Rutherford said students can still help reduce waste by analyzing how much food they actually need to take.

“[By going trayless], you go through the thought process of, ‘Am I hungry enough for two pieces of pizza or just one?’” Rutherford said. “Because you have the ability to go back, you don’t need to take everything at once … and can be more conscious of [how much you take].”