On four Thursday evenings in March and April at John Jay Dining Hall, Columbia EcoReps scraped fellow students' dinner plates, then weighed the food, liquids and paper products they'd collected.

An average of 1030 diners on March 5, 26 and April 9 generated an average of 174 pounds of solid waste, 10 gallons of liquid waste and 24 pounds of paper waste.

Behavior informed by the consequences of food choice, particularly related to the increase in greenhouse gases from chemical fertilizers; pesticides; farm machinery; food processing; packaging; and transportation, has been the goal of campus plate-scraping efforts that date back to Oct. 5, 2005. Using three huge garbage cans and a scale borrowed from Barnard, students from the Food Sustainability Project in collaboration with Dining Services scraped 450 pounds of food that night.

As the scraping project has evolved over the past four years, so too has its refinement, especially by using the scraping metrics to develop a baseline that further validates each year's efforts, says Michael Novielli, Chief of Administration, Student Auxiliary and Business Services.

Differences in the amount of waste from the four scrapings in March and April were statistically insignificant. "It doesn't quite tell the story we'd like," Novielli says. "So next year we're setting food waste reduction goals of 5 percent from scraping to scraping."

Early brainstorming with the EcoReps in next year's planning has focused on information campaigns, including posters and digital signage, that will alert students to the waste reduction effort and its rationale. EcoReps also plan to increase their educational outreach to RAs and find ways to develop a stronger partnership with Residential Programs.

Liz Allocco, CC '11, has been a John Jay EcoRep this year. Allocco says the scraping has been a good way to make students aware of how much food they're taking, yet not eating. She's concerned, however, that they know why the scraping is taking place beyond "EcoReps in the dining hall slowing things up about some crazy environmental thing.

"One of our goals is to develop the plate-scraping program and present the food-waste data that we collect in a way that will make students aware of food issues larger than Columbia, like hunger and the local food movement, as well as what they can do about them."

Michael Pollan, whose most recent books are In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, and The Omnivore's Dilemma,says "after cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy - 19 percent."