In The News

In an effort to fight food waste and to help tho se in need, the Lycoming College Sustainability Committee has teamed up with the Food Recovery Network (FRN) to save surplus food in the college’s dining hall and donate it to the local shelter of the American Rescue Workers (ARW). The FRN unites college students at campuses across the country to help save some of the more than 36 million tons of food that is wasted in the United States each year by collecting leftover food from dining halls and donating it to community members in need. Since September 201 1, it has expanded to 50 schools and has recovered more than 245,000 pounds of food that would otherwise have been wasted.

Students from Lycoming’s Sustainability Committee learned about the network while attending the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium in State College last October. Around the same time, Michael Kane, a 2013 Lycoming graduate and ARW men’s program director, independently reached out to Leslie Ekstrand, general manager of Parkhurst, Lycoming’s dining serv ices provider, and inquired about creating a similar program to re - purpose leftover food. Ekstrand put him in touch with the sustainability committee and the partnership with ARW was formed shortly thereafter.

The ARW shelter serves a couple hundred meals per day and are grateful for the donations. The students began recovering food in mid - January and during the first two weeks of the program, they saved more than 500 pounds of food from being wasted, sometimes saving up to 93.5 pounds in a single day. In order to recover such a large amount of food, students visit the dining hall daily, after lunch and dinner, to pick up containers of surplus food that have been packaged and weighed by Parkhurst staff members. The students then deliver the food to the ARW shelter. The Lycoming FRN chapter joins two other AICUP member schools, Allegheny College and Mercyhurst University, to join the program and all are managed by Parkhurst Dining.