[Disclaimer: For privacy purposes, all Gordon Commons employees quoted in this article will be referred to anonymously.]
For at least a year, Gordon Commons’ compost has been frequently contaminated by students putting non-compostable items into the compost waste stream. To address these issues, the Vassar administration ran two trial weeks, from March 2 to 6 and March 23 to 27, in which all food scraps in Gordon Commons were scraped and sorted into compost and garbage by workers in the dish room instead of students. “Have I seen the change? Yeah, it’s clean,” said Josephine Papagni, Co-Owner and Operator of Greenway Environmental Services, the composting company Vassar College has worked with for over 25 years. She said that Vassar is one of the leading academic institutions she has seen in separating and composting organic waste.
“We agreed this would be a trial period,” Director of Sustainability Ken Foster and Director of Dining Services Chris Mongeon wrote in a joint email to The Miscellany News. “It is not a permanent change at this time.” The administration plans to evaluate the trial period over the summer, but said there is no current timeline for a final decision.
The main source of contamination, Papagni told the Miscellany, is with “compostable disposables” such as compostable plates, cups and cutlery, which Greenway does not usually accept from regular and large clients. The compostable disposables themselves are not a problem, Papagni explained, but once they are allowed into the composting waste stream, people begin putting similar-looking plastic items into the compost, contaminating the entire load. Foster and Mongeon wrote that despite compostable disposables often bringing contamination, Vassar has continued stocking the dining hall with them, such as when the dishwasher is unavailable or employees are unable to keep up with busy mealtimes. “We’ve been working to balance these operational realities while continuing to move toward more sustainable practices,” they wrote.
When Greenway receives a contaminated compost load from Vassar—or any other client—a Greenway employee must pick out each piece of garbage by hand. “If you have to put on boots and wade into a huge pile of food waste, even if it’s three pieces [of garbage], it’s too much. You have to get it out,” Papagni explained. “If you don’t get it out, you’re contaminating your whole load.” She confirmed by email that Greenway has received loads of Vassar’s compost that were so contaminated that the entire 35-gallon load had to be thrown in the trash. Foster and Mongeon wrote, “This has often caused all waste (including compost) generated in the dining room to be discarded as trash, nulling a significant portion of composting efforts in Gordon Commons.”
For the past several months, Papagni has been noticing what she called “waves” of contamination in Vassar’s compost. For weeks, there would be no contamination at all. Then, for weeks, she would see trash in the compost load every day. She said that no matter how much signage there is telling people which items are compostable, any unsupervised plate scraping will inevitably lead to some measure of contamination. “People generally don’t read signs,” she commented. Finally, about a month ago, Papagni asked the Vassar administration to move plate scraping to the dish room to stop the contamination.
Papagni, Foster and Mongeon noted that Vassar dish room employees sorted food waste for decades. That changed after renovations to Gordon Commons were completed in 2019, including a “complete renovation” of the dish room, according to the Vassar website. “Many of our employees have worked here for years. They remember scraping plates in the past,” Foster and Mongeon wrote. But according to one Gordon Commons employee, “We used this method years ago, but we also had two dishrooms at that time.” In response to a question about re-implementing dish room waste sorting with only one dish room, Foster and Mongeon wrote, “Again, all of this will be taken into consideration when we evaluate the program and determine the best path forward.”
Papagni said that she only learned that Gordon Commons had moved to student scraping one or two years ago, half a decade after it had begun. The periodic contamination had been an ongoing confusion in the background—learning that students were scraping their plates unsupervised explained the issue.
On Monday, March 23, Papagni trained dish room employees for two shifts, from 12 to 8:30 p.m. “They got it right away. It was easy,” Papagni said. She continued, “They work really, really incredibly hard. I couldn’t believe it.” When one employee went on break, the others spread out to cover the increased workload and keep the dish room running smoothly. “It’s not a hard job, it’s not a difficult job, but it’s hard work,” Papagni said. “I was just very moved by what a great team [they were].”
Dish room employees who spoke to the Miscellany said that adding waste sorting to their duties made the work unsustainable. “It was terrible,” one employee said. “It was too much,” another described, “and it was less people here to do it.” A third recalled, “To me, it’s like you’re doing three shifts in one.” Employees reported that only one or two people were assigned to remove all of the plates from the dish conveyor belt and sort all of the waste into compost and garbage. To keep up with the work, employees said, three people needed to be assigned to that station. According to Foster and Mongeon, the structure of the dish room only allows one or two employees to remove dishes from the conveyor belt and sort waste at a time.
One employee reported that dish room staffers were moved to other stations, such as serving food, during the trial period. Foster and Mongeon stated that the opposite was true: “For the trial, staff from the front of the dish room was allocated to the back.”
Furthermore, employees said that to keep up with the volume of dishes, they had to work too quickly to sort waste effectively. Papagni, Foster and Mongeon reported that there were fewer non-compostable items in the compost during the trial week, but workers said the system was not perfect. “The employees were still putting the garbage inside the compost,” one explained. “It was just that they were rushing to try to do the job.”
Papagni said that despite the increased workload that waste sorting brought, “There was no complaint. They were very friendly and respectful toward me.” She argued, “I think it would have been the perfect opportunity to complain to me. I am a neutral person. They know this stuff comes to my compost facility. They know I’m not the boss. They know I’m not a part of administration.” One employee contested this version of events: “She heard complaints, but she probably said that because she’s the one getting the waste, and she wants her waste to be clean.”
According to Foster and Mongeon, management “frequently” checked in with dish room employees during the trial. They wrote, “A few employees expressed frustration towards the end of the trial period… We are seeking feedback to understand the impact on employees. In the meantime, we will continue to monitor the conditions so composting can remain a viable option.”
Gordon Commons employees told the Miscellany that dish room waste sorting is not feasible with the current staff level. “The shit they try to implement don’t make sense when we don’t got the manpower,” said one. An employee said they had spoken directly with administrators about understaffing: “I went to them. They looked at me like I got 20 heads. I said, ‘If y’all give us extra work, y’all either give us more people or give us extra pay. Y’all giving us extra work and y’all taking people out of here.”
Administrators said that staffing will be a consideration in future plans for waste sorting. “The trial period allows us to observe the impact of the change and hear from employees to determine if we are adequately staffed and we hope to further evaluate that in the coming weeks,” Foster and Mongeon wrote. One worker did not have faith that more employees would be hired if plate scraping is permanently moved to the dish room. “Whatever they can do not to hire somebody and save money,” he said, “that’s what they do.”
In a statement to the Miscellany, Vassar Students for Equitable Environmental Decisions wrote, “If Vassar is going back to having employees scrape plates, which now seems like the most viable and sustainable solution, the college must ensure that there are enough workers in the dish room and that they have adequate space to do the job safely and effectively.”
For the time being, students will continue to scrape their plates unsupervised. It remains unknown when the administration will make a final decision about the future of Gordon Commons’ composting.