Student Dining Leftover Feeds Animals

Type of practice Reuse for feed

Name of practice Student Dining Leftover Feeds Animals

Name of main actor Dining Services of New Jersey’s Rutgers University and Pinter Farms

Type of actor(s) Farmers, Public authority

Location United States of America

Stage of implementation End-of-life

Year of implementation 1960

What was/is being done? Rutgers University is home to the third largest student dining operation in the country. Dining facilities serve over 3.3 million meals and cater more than 5,000 events each year. Rutgers currently spends more than $100,000 per year to get rid of leftover food at its four dining halls. A local pig farmer, Steve Pinter of Pinter farms is paid to haul away about 10 tons of food waste per day from the four dining halls. Rutgers boasts one of the best and oldest food recovery programs in the country, beginning in the 1960s. After every meal, the staff takes trays from the busing stations to the kitchen and scrapes food from the dishware into a trough. The trough moves the food, as well as used napkins, into a pulper.1 The pulper pulverizes the food scraps and removes excess water, reducing the volume by up to 80 percent. The reduced quantities of waste are deposited in barrels that are stored in a refrigerator until Pinter hauls them to his farm. Water from the system is recycled to transport more scraps to the pulper. Pinter’s farm is less than 15 miles away. He uses the pulverized food scraps to feed his hogs and cattle, just as his grandfather did almost 50 years ago. For his services, Pinter charges $30 per ton, as opposed to the approximately $60 that Rutgers pays to haul a ton of trash to the landfill.

Outcomes and impacts In 2007, Rutgers’ partnership with Pinter Farms saved Dining Services more than $100,000 in avoided hauling costs. While Rutgers incurs added maintenance costs from using the pulpers and refrigerated storage areas, pulping food scraps on site decreases the labor and storage space needed for waste management. Feeding food scraps to animals avoids methane, a greenhouse gas, generation from landfill disposal. Also, using food waste for animal feed preserves valuable resources, such as fresh water and arable land, since less feed needs to be produced.