Green Column

Have you ever counted how many napkins you grab in the dining hall at once? My friends and I tried a little social experiment this week, with interesting results.
I went up to the napkin basket and made a conscious effort to grab a single napkin. My fingers were simply not nimble enough; I came back with three. I was surprised, but gave up and headed back to my table to see how my friends did. Already at our table lay two different stacks of brown paper napkins; my friends each came back with a small stack of five or so to make our total count 31 napkins amongst three people — about 10 napkins a person. Even with food as messy as Philly Cheese Steak or Sloppy Joe’s, one doesn’t need 10 different napkins.
On a normal food day and with a conscious effort to conserve, I exercised the unfolding method and used a total of 1 napkin throughout my meal. My friends, who weren’t nearly as deliberate in their napkin usage, still only needed a total of two napkins each. Thus, only about one-sixth of the napkins grabbed that meal were utilized; the rest were left on the table, only to remain there for the rest of lunch hour.
It’s hard to think that at such an environmentally friendly school like Middlebury, we waste as much as we do. Though we may lead the path in sustainability for small colleges like ourselves, we still tend to overlook the smaller concerns. Napkin waste in the dining halls is just one of these underground plights. The baskets of napkins now in place simply encourage these wasteful tendencies; not only do they make it easy to pick up more napkins than needed per person, but they actually make it difficult to pick up a single napkin at a time. Middlebury, however, is not alone in this dilemma. During an average year, an American uses approximately 2,200 napkins — around six each day. If everyone in the U.S. used one less napkin a day, more than a billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year.
Jiayi Zhu ’14 recognized this problem as soon as she stepped foot in a dining hall this fall. “There were napkins everywhere, on the table, on the floor, in chairs,” she said. “I was surprised by how many napkins kids took at a time. But when it came to me, I found it's hard to just take one napkin because they kind of stick together.”
As a member of the Student Government Association’s Environmental Affairs Committee, Jiayi proposed her ideas about eliminating napkin waste in the dining halls. After much debate over the best method of implementing this initiative, the Committee has decided to work with Dining Services to obtain new napkin dispensers that only allow one napkin to be taken a time.
“The company that provides the napkins has a great relationship with the College and is offering us dispensers free of charge as the napkins that we purchase from them are ideal for the dispensers,” said Committee head Rachel Callender ’12.5. “There is no additional cost, labor is reduced by fewer napkins being wasted and paper waste is also cut down.”
Middlebury already has an extremely green dining system. A fourth of our food is local and we compost nearly 300 pounds of food each year. Each dining hall has low-flow faucets, energy-efficient lighting, and even a water-recycling device on the dishwashing machine. This napkin initiative will simply take our sustainable dining one step further. Though they have not been purchased yet, the Committee hopes to have the dispensers in place early next semester. Hopefully, these dispensers will work their sustainable magic and decrease the amount of napkins people waste. However, it’s up to us as a student body to make an effort to take less and waste less. So, next time you’re at the napkin basket, think before you take.