Every day, Princeton students eat food in dining halls, dutifully scrape their leftovers into metal chutes labeled “Food Waste & Napkins,” and move on with their days. What journey does this food waste take? “A food scrap actually has a lot of value when you return it to the earth in a responsible way,” Food Systems Project Specialist Gina Talt emphasized. According to Talt, the University sent an average of 70–75 tons of wasted food per month to their off-site energy waste facility, Trenton Biogas, during the Fall 2022 semester; that’s almost one pound of food per meal swipe.
On campus, she manages the composting program at Princeton’s S.C.R.A.P. (Sustainable Composting Research at Princeton) Lab. The lab, affectionately known as “Scrappy,” launched in 2018 through a grant secured by the Office of Sustainability. The project operates year-round, using small-scale composting technology to process food and turn it into nutrient-dense soil to be used as fertilizer on Princeton’s grounds.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the composting team was forced to temporarily pause the project in early 2020. For over two years, all of Princeton’s leftovers were sent to Trenton Biogas, until the S.C.R.A.P. Lab reopened last fall. Now, food waste is taken from the Frist Campus Center, campus retail cafés, and both Coffee Club locations and sent to its new location at 300 Washington Road. Today, 15 percent of overall wasted food at Princeton is processed by the S.C.R.A.P. Lab. Every week, it accepts 200–300 pounds of coffee grounds from Coffee Club and 2000 pounds of food from Frist, according to Talt. Because the Lab is a small-scale operation with a stated capacity of 5000 pounds per week, the remaining 85 percent of wasted food at Princeton, which comes from dining halls, is sent to Trenton Biogas.