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NewsvineWant to start doing your part to reduce waste? Starting this week, Ciao!, the cafe located in the basement of the Terman Engineering Building, will be offering customers the choice of biodegradable service ware — trays, forks, knives, spoons, napkins and soup cups will all be available for an additional 15 cents per meal.
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If the program is successful, Ciao! owner Giuseppe Carruba will consider offering biodegradable utensils at his other cafes on campus, including Cafe Riacci and the Law School Cafe, and may consider phasing out plastic and Styrofoam utensils completely.
“If one out of two or three people choose biodegradable, I will consider it to be successful,” Carruba said. “We’re losing money off of it compared to Styrofoam — it costs more than 15 cents — but we want to keep it affordable for people.”
Sophomores Dayoung Lee and Dawn Kwan provided the inspiration for the new project in their freshman Program in Writing and Rhetoric class “The Politics of Food” last spring. As part of their Community Writing Project component, they decided to work with the non-profit organization World Centric, which is based in Palo Alto and produces bio-compostable food service and packaging products.
“We did a bunch of research about different natural materials,” Lee said. “We also did a campus-wide survey, mostly undergraduates but faculty and graduate students as well, and asked how much more people would pay for products that were made of natural materials. We got a lot of positive responses.”
Lee and Kwan contacted several cafes on campus and Ciao! expressed interest. The pair has been working with Ciao! since the end of spring quarter, when they finished their final report and cost-benefit analysis in preparation to implement the program.
The new service ware will include materials from bagasse products, made of sugar cane, and bio-plastics, made from potato and corn starch. One of the several benefits of the new products is that the materials can be composted instead of crowding landfills.
Composting the service ware provided at Ciao!, however, might be a challenge, as Stanford does not yet have a wide-spread composting system and the cafe does not have easy access to a bin. Although the long-term details have yet to be finalized, the biodegradable material will currently be collected in a separate trashcan and transferred to the Toyon composting bins.
Project organizers expressed the need for increased use of biodegradable materials across campus.
“Our goal is to eventually establish a more widespread composting program that includes direct service to cafes and row houses,” said sophomore Emily Humphreys, who is helping with the composting details. “These products require much less energy to produce and are made from renewable resources, so they are an environmental improvement even if land-filled.
The new biodegradable service ware option at Ciao! is one of several new efforts to make eateries at Stanford more green. Sim-
-ilar programs may soon hit the Business School’s Arbuckle Cafe and Moon Beans. Some cafes on campus offer a discount to customers who bring their own mug.
“We plan to do a consumer survey after a month or two-trial period,” Lee said. “We aren’t forcing everyone to buy this and we will track the percentage of customers who do. If it works out fine, we will write up a report and try to implement it in other cafes too.”
The service ware will be available later this week, as soon as advertising for the project has been completed.