Hi Jen & Morgan,

I’ll be putting additional notes I took onto the shared OneNote, but wanted to put it on your radar that I met with a school that has successfully eliminated almost all its single-use plastic, Vanderbilt, and they shared the overview and insights into this process:

• Implemented fall 2019. Products are now sold in aluminum, boxes (e.g “Boxed Water”), or glass.
• This was an initiative that Dining led (with great vigor, it sounds like).
• Dining had the infrastructure and support to do it:
  
  • Reusable aluminum bottles are provided to new students each year with information about plastic reduction efforts on campus.
  • The school has many water bottle filler stations.
  • Unanimous support from the rest of the school (students, faculty, staff, admin).
• It was not an easy transition:
  
  • Originally the school had Coca-Cola as the beverage partner. Coca-Cola was not on board with supplying only aluminum long-term, so when the contract ended, the school switched to Pepsi.
• And the transition is attempting to be expanded…
  
  • Plastic bottles are still served to athletes at Athletics’  “nutrition centers” where the athletes eat: Gatorade bottles and sports drinks are their biggest consumption habits here. Sustainability is working on convincing their Athletics unit to get on board with this elimination. It is the student athletes who consume more single-use plastic than the fans who attend the events.
• Dining is a huge advocate of sustainability efforts in general:
  
  • They’ve implemented a compost program for kitchen scraps and leftover student food at the dining halls.
  • They have a reusable to-go program.
  • At markets you can fill your own reusable bottle with bulk drinks: sparkling water, cold brew, nitro coffee.
  • They very recently piloted a bulk foods program for one of their markets (picture attached).
• Anecdotally, the sustainability and recycling contacts I talked with think single-use water sales are down in the non-plastic materials.

Not to chase a pipe dream here with eliminating plastic on our campus, but the zero waste coordinator should be an instigator, right? 😊

Thank you,

Daphne