Team COMS, Rachel Behm, and Jackie Kanaskie are proud to announce that we, along with other EACAP teams, have spent this past semester paving the way for the Food Recovery Network to flourish on campus during fall 2015. A large part of our endeavors this past spring semester involved raising awareness of food waste through surveys, observational studies, posts on social media, and our Earth Day event held in the Gaige building.

We strive to eliminate food waste in as many ways as possible including swapping the less popular food from Tully’s for a more desirable option, taking leftover Tully’s food at the end of the day and redistributing it to homeless shelters, and, eventually, introducing composting to Berks campus. Also, Team Sailor Moon explored ways to turn leftover oil into energy.

The Food Recovery Network will have a strong group of students behind it. We have been in contact with the Food Recovery Network for the past few months learning about what it will take to begin our own chapter. We also collected a list of student names and email addresses and received very positive responses towards the initiative the Food Recovery Network is taking.

During the past couple of weeks, team C.O.M.S. has worked through various steps to help set-up the new Food Recovery Chapter. The chapter is not yet officially established, however many surveys were created and passed out to take note of the abundance of leftovers on the campus. The survey our team was put in charge of was the campus based persons that eat on and off campus. The surveys will soon be all collected and we may move further with a plan of action.