Starting today, students eating at Union Square in Tresidder have the option of composting their trash instead of tossing it, just in time to cap off Earth Week. As the first step in the complete transition to biodegradable service ware at Stanford Dining retail locations, the compostables will include cups, plates, containers, straws and napkins made from sugar cane, potato starch and corn starch.

The adoption of compostable food service ware and packages was inspired in part by the yearlong efforts of Dawn Kwan ‘09 and Dayoung Lee ‘09, who worked with the non-profit organization World Centric for the community writing component of their Program in Writing and Rhetoric class last spring. Their collaboration with the Palo Alto-based group, which advocates and produces compostable service ware, eventually produced cost-benefit analyses of adopting compostable service ware for MoonBean’s and Ciao!, the basement cafe in the Terman Engineering building.

The idea was appealing to Ciao! owner Giuseppe Carruba, whose cafes are not affiliated with Stanford Dining. Last November, Ciao! began offering biodegradable service ware at an additional cost of 15 cents per meal.

“Ciao! was really a pilot program, and the response was great,” Kwan said. “About one in three people would choose compostable service ware. The problem was that because it was only a partial transition, it was difficult to keep the compost from being contaminated with non-biodegradable trash.”

Stanford Dining’s new program will introduce biodegradable service ware to all of its restaurants and cafes in collaboration with Meeting Services at Tresidder, the Alumni Association, Residential and Dining Enterprises and Peninsula Sanitary Services Inc. (PSSI), which currently collects compost from campus dining halls. According to Julie Muir, PSSI community relations manager, the trash collection component will be temporarily limited to Tresidder to minimize contamination.

“There are a lot of details involved with collecting compostables from the public,” she said. “It’s different at the dining halls because it’s possible to train a certain number of staff members and to keep compost dumpsters locked. But cafes require a different set of considerations, so we plan to use Tresidder as a model before applying it to the CoHo and other eateries.”

Student volunteers will be stationed at Tresidder to help separate compostable waste for the first week of the program. Muir said that a similar approach was used successfully at the Arbuckle Cafe at the Graduate School of Business — not affiliated with Stanford Dining — when it went fully compostable in January.

“Not everyone reads the signs, so it was helpful to have students be visible reminders in the beginning,” Muir said. “But recently, people have been throwing their compostables into the recycling bin. I think education will have to be a constant presence because composting is such a new thing that it will be a while before doing it becomes normal.”

She added that purchasing compostable service ware, even if it initially ends up in the landfill instead of the compost heap, is an important step forward.

“Buying compostable supports the market,” she said. “These products will continue to be produced, and I have no doubt that they will eventually be used at all cafes on campus.”

Lee agreed.

“People are much more ready to consider using biodegradable service ware,” she said. “And if Stanford Dining rolls it out, other cafes will have an incentive — economic and otherwise — to follow it. When the program at Tresidder is successful, we’ll have a much stronger case to push.”

The transition to biodegradable service ware is part of Stanford Dining’s larger Earth Week celebration today that includes the introduction of a weekly produce stand at Tresidder and “Eat Local” barbecues at Tresidder, The Alumni Cafe and Olives.

The Stanford Produce Stand, which will be open from noon until 5 p.m. every Friday during the growing season, will offer fruits and vegetables from local farmers and co-ops. Staffed by student volunteers from Students for a Sustainable Stanford, the stand will also be a pick-up site for a Community Sponsored Agriculture collaboration. Stanford community members will be able to pre-order their produce and pick it up from the stand.

The “Eat Local” barbecues will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. As part of the Earth Week Celebration, complimentary food samples will be provided at the CoHo and in front of Dinkelspiel Auditorium beginning at 11 a.m.