Since last spring, Colorado College’s Office of Sustainability has been collaborating with the Colorado Springs organization Care and Share to reduce campus waste.
Care and Share is a distributer for food banks across Southern Colorado that was founded in 1972. Orders are sent to Care and Share for certain food groups, like proteins or desserts, and Care and Share provides those items. Their mission is to curtail hunger in Southern Colorado.
Meredith Allen, a senior at Colorado College, is the Office of Sustainability Care and Share Intern. Through her position at the organization and within the Colorado College Office of Sustainability, Allen has been working to reduce the amount of food and material waste that Care and Share sends to the landfill.
“When food is sent to Care and Share, most of it is sorted through by volunteers,” said Allen. “During this process, a lot of food is damaged or cans are broken or the food has expired.”
This is where Randy Garger at Care and Share saw a solution. Allen now helps the organization find ways of diverting that waste.
“My role is to take on exploratory measures to prevent food that is not edible from going into the landfill,” said Allen.
Allen has recently been working on a project that involves turning the food products that normally go to waste into animal feed and reselling the aluminum cans for a profit.
Additionally, much of the food that is sent to Care and Share is listed as expired even though a lot of food may still be edible.
“Food stamps in the United States are pretty arbitrarily assigned,” said Allen. “A lot of the food is still good after those dates, but it’s illegal to feed it to people who come to the shelters.”
As a result of these binding expiration dates, a great deal of food goes straight to the landfill still in the can.
Last year, Allen helped with the actual creation of the animal foods that were sold to farmers.
This year, she is working on policy for Care and Share so that the zero waste program that has been developed can be used by other food banks across the United States.
However, she hopes to recruit volunteers from CC to make the animal food. “I hope to be a liaison between Care and Share and Colorado College and create more opportunities for collaboration after I’ve graduated,” said Allen.
For Allen, this internship is a marriage of her academic and personal interests. Allen created her own major, which is called Sustainability and Social Action.
“It’s really at the intersection of environmental politics and sociology,” said Allen. “I’m personally a believer in creating pragmatic solutions to the environmental crisis that are tailored to specific communities, rather than broader policies.”