Going Trayless?

Our campaign to go trayless has me worried. Although we seem to have a good amount of support for the facebook event, almost 900 students, it seems that the dishwashing procedure for our dining halls is different than that of other schools, i.e. the water is run constantly. Obviously saving water was one of the main impacts that we expected to have in going trayless, but if the water is, in fact, always on, then we won't actually be saving any. I know someone that worked as part of TUDS and they said that in Carmichael the water is always on, so I suppose the same must be true for Dewick. This is disheartening, but I'm wondering if there is a way that we could change that and how much that might cost the school.

On the facebook event there are already people picking apart our arguments for going trayless because compared to other ways to save water, such as taking shorter showers, it won't have as much of an impact. There's also the idea that it doesn't matter how much food is wasted because it all ends up composted anyway, which Frances countered by saying that preparing less food would save energy. I'm wondering if there are other reasons to support not wasting food (if it's all composted) because, as one student pointed out, we're not donating leftovers to food banks or anything of the sort.

I don't want to be advocating for students to go trayless if it will have little to no impact. It's upsetting to me because I had thought this was the best social marketing campaign and found some really interesting statistics from other schools showing a significant impact. However, the way Tufts dishwashers operate will keep this campaign from having any great impact. This is definitely an issue we'll need to confront because, as one student mentioned, there's no need to inconvenience the student body if we won't be saving water and energy.

This is all just very frustrating because if we had the necessary infrastructure, it seems like the support is there to ditch trays. As it is, though, there are holes in our argument whichw we can hopefully fix by talking with dining services and/or the administration about the way dishes are done. We definitely had a lot of great ideas about how to get our message across to students, so it would be nice if we could do something about this dishwashing system and continue on with our social campaign. In any case, I'll continue going trayless.