Campus Dining Services

Social Responsibility & Environmental Sustainability Information
The dining halls at Oberlin College do more than feed students and staff. Through progressive procurement policies, including an extensive Farm to Fork program, sustainable seafood principles, animal proteins free of human-therapeutic growth hormones and antibiotics, socially-aligned coffee choices and cage-free eggs, Oberlin College and Bon Appétit Management Company provide nutritious meals that invest in nearby farms, dairies, ranches and aquaculture operations, preserve the bounty of our oceans, lakes and fields so they can feed future generations, and provide sufficient incomes to food producers so they can live with dignity.

Oberlin Student Cooperative Association Dining Halls

The Oberlin Student Cooperative Association (OSCA) is a student-run housing and dining cooperative system that has been in existence since 1950. It has about 640 members in total and currently operates 9 cooperative dining halls and 4 cooperative housing programs. OSCA has an extensive local foods program that supports many small local farms. OSCA works with a few vendors who will deliver local foods and also has a few farms that will deliver to OSCA dining halls in farm-owned trucks. OSCA also owns its own truck and, at least once a week, a team of OSCA members from each of the different co-ops drive out to small farms around the county and make purchases directly from Amish farmers who would not easily be able to deliver food. Co-ops tend to purchase organic food when possible, but in many cases local food is preferred to certified organic food. As OSCA membership changes semester to semester, so does food policy, but OSCA has maintained a serious commitment to buying local foods since the program began in the early 1990’s.

Composting at Oberlin

Oberlin College is working in coalition with George Jones Farm to compost in the dining halls. Currently, the two main dining halls compost all raw food kitchen prep, while on-campus cafes compost coffee grinds and tea bags. George Jones Farm picks up the food scraps three times a week, bringing it back to the farm, where it is fed to the farm animals or brought to a large pile of municipal leaf mulch, where it is mixed before introducing to vermicomposting systems.

The 650 member OSCA (Oberlin Student Cooperative Association) composts all of its organic food waste and non-food compostable waste. Twice a week, a group of elected composters from the various co-ops bring the compostable waste to the George Jones Farm, where they chop and aerate the compost, preparing the compost to decompose into quality fertilizer. The finished compost is applied to garden beds of George Jones Farm.

The college’s goal is to find more ways in which organic waste can be redirected in order to reduce waste and to support local foods economies.

Campus Dining Services plans to purchase of a grinder and pulper for use in dining halls and in the community. A pulper pulverizes and extracts liquids from organic products, allowing for the composting of post-consumer cooked organic waste from dining halls, which would otherwise be too full of disease to become quality compost. A grinder shreds organic waste, allowing for the composting of biodegradable take-out containers, which would otherwise take approximately one year to decompose. Composting post-consumer waste and biodegradable containers will allow for a significant reduction in the land-fill bound waste stream of Oberlin College.

The college also plans to create coalitions with the community, working alongside George Jones Farm and the Oberlin Community Composting Coalition, to allow community organizations, businesses, and residents to waste less and compost more.