Food. Sustainability

Gourmet Dining, NJCU’s food services provider, is striving to move away from purchasing industrial outsourced food, products in an effort to serve locally available ingredients to provide a fresher, low waste, and energy efficient dining experience. The majority of products purchased by Gourmet Dining are from local east coast providers. With our investment in a BioHiTech digester, carbon emissions are drastically reduced along with substantially lower energy costs year round, further, we have made an attempt to incorporate biodegradable cleaning and sanitizing solutions where possible. Gourmet Dining is fully committed to making NJCU’s carbon footprint as small as possible. When staff, students, and faculty come together to embrace this commitment to environmental improvements, NJCU can achieve a triumph, not only for the present, but for future generations as well.

FOOD DIGESTER DASHBOARD (Statistics)

The BioHiTech Digester has been implemented by New Jersey City University, along with Gourmet Dining, to help us avoid sending NJCU’s food waste to local landfills. Instead, NJCU’s food waste is disposed of on-site in an environmentally safe manner. Gourmet Dining uses one digester unit, located in Vodra Hall, to process food waste from all food areas on campus. Food from all areas on campus is brought to the digester and processed daily.

The data shown below is updated throughout the day, every day of the week. We hope you’ll come back often and watch as we continuously dispose more of our food waste on-site in order to help save the planet. The “On-Site Food Waste Processing” chart shown below provides real-time information as to how much food waste NJCU was able to process on-site (using the digester) instead of having to send the food waste to the local landfills. The “Environmental Impact” chart shows the impact NJCU achieved by avoiding the use of garbage trucks to haul food waste to local landfills. CO2 gases that trap heat in the atmosphere are called greenhouse gases. By not sending our food waste to local landfills by way of garbage trucks, NJCU is able to contribute to reducing the greenhouse gases that collect in our atmosphere. The information represented as “Acres of Forest” and “Trees Planted” denotes the number of trees and acres of forests in the United States which would consume an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases (C02) to produce oxygen over one year, compared to the savings that NJCU achieved by using the BioHiTech Digester.

Be sure to watch the short video below for details on how the digester process works and why we have implemented this at NJCU.