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April 18, 2008, 07:35 AM ET
At Eckerd College, Eco to Go
The EcoClamshell, a reusable to-go container, may reduce waste at Eckerd College. (Courtesy of Eckerd College.)
Those infamous polystyrene clamshells for takeout food might last hundreds of years in a landfill, but at Eckerd College their days may be numbered.
Taking their place is the EcoClamshell — a teal-colored, reusable plastic vessel. For $5, students sign up in Eckerd’s dining facility to use the containers to carry their take-away burgers and fries. The studente are responsible for bringing the containers back, and the containers are then sent through the dining facility’s dishwasher and put back into circulation.
Audrey M. Copeland, a 2007 graduate of Eckerd who is now an intern at the college working on environmental projects, developed the idea from an environmental-studies class she took in her second year. In a class assignment, she learned that more than two million tons of polystyrene products are dumped into landfills nationwide every year. She started trying to think of ways to reduce that waste on the campus.
It took two years, three cafeteria managers, and a $32,000 grant from the Environmental Research and Education Foundation in the summer of 2007, she says, before the project got off the ground. Finally, Ms. Copeland had a working prototype, which the college’s dining-service provider and a Texas-based manufacturer picked up shortly afterward.
Ms. Copeland hasn’t calculated how much waste the containers have averted since the college introduced them in March, and only time will tell if they catch on. Of the 1,000 students on the campus meal plan, 200, at last count, had signed up to use the EcoClamshell.
“We didn’t want to back people into a corner,” says Ms. Copeland, but she hopes the visibility of the bright teal containers will create a bit of social pressure.
They’re not exactly easy to lose, she says. —Hurley Goodall
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