Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran is playing a concert. Here!?
The Centennial Founders' Day Celebration was incredible, from the headline performance to the amazing acapella group and distinguished speakers. It’s an experience that blew our minds away.
But as we listened, something felt a bit ironic. Rousing speeches questioned students and faculty alike: "Who will write this story? It’s a story about saving lives and our planet." Here was a university dedicated to educating future leaders and inspiring genuine good. Yet its day-to-day practices seem to tell a different story. For all its emphasis on a sustainable future, Duke, like many American universities, relies heavily on single-use plastics and disposable dining items. This raises an uncomfortable question: Can a school that speaks so passionately about saving the planet truly call itself a sustainability leader?
Excited to dabble in investigative journalism, we’ve been tracking our waste production. Spending five days dining on Duke’s campus, we each used 15 single-use containers, 17 plastic utensils — 3 with additional plastic wrapping — and 6 single-use cups. If we were to follow this routine year-round, together we’d accumulate over 1600 plastic items just from meals alone. Each piece of plastic could take 400 years to decompose. Multiplied across Duke’s student body, the environmental cost is exponential. In total, U.S. college students contribute more than 200 million tons of waste annually, and much of it is single-use plastic. This cultural convenience comes with a heavy, lasting footprint. What is also interesting is that there are reusable containers, but they are rarely seen. You cannot use them when you mobile order, and you have to ask for them in the restaurants. The default choice is the unsustainable one.
"But many of our reusable containers have cardboard portions or are made of paper," you might argue. However, conducting a general survey around the various garbage bins on campus, we unfortunately found that this recyclable component had been incongruously mixed with other trash, and eventually unceremoniously carted off as general waste to a landfill.
Meanwhile, Annie Ming's friends studying at universities in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, experience an entirely different environment. NSW recently enacted strict single-use plastic bans, including bans on "biodegradable" PLA objects, forcing institutions to adopt sustainable practices. As a result, Australian students often dine using reusable dishware or eco-friendly alternatives like wooden utensils and paper containers. Enlisting friends to record their waste and averaging it out, Australian student weekly plastic use is minimal — on average, they use five disposable items a week. For those living on campus, the dining hall is outfitted with strictly reusable plates and cutlery, and leftover food is separated to compost. Whilst Duke has similarly banned single-use plastic, it did not ban PLA alternatives. As mentioned in this March article, PLA will only decompose under a set of specific conditions and will take up to a century to degrade in landfills.
This sustainable approach isn’t just a choice; it’s a matter of policy. NSW’s legislation is designed to reduce plastic waste by 30% by 2025, setting a national standard that universities must follow. Duke, however, lacks comparable regulations. While Duke offers recycling programs, North Carolina has no single-use plastic bans or strong incentives for universities to adopt eco-friendly options. Duke’s sustainability efforts, in this context, feel limited and largely voluntary, making it challenging to achieve the same standards of environmental stewardship seen at Australian universities.
The Freie Universitaet Berlin, Jakob's home university, goes one step further and does not provide any opportunities for non-permanent takeaway containers. Each student is expected to bring a Tupperware container from home or borrow one from a friend. This drastically simplifies the system, removing the need for the expensive recycling methods described above. Another difference that struck us was not only the packaging but also the waste of leftovers, especially meat. Jakob's cafeteria in Berlin is mostly meat-free, and the fish and meat dishes are only served on special days or traditions (e.g. fish on Friday, due to Europe’s religious history). This subtly reduces consumption and waste of the most resource-intensive part of our diet. In addition, meals can be portioned by the consumer in a buffet style, which reduces the need for large servings.
To be fair, a few U.S. universities in states like California have adopted similar bans on single-use plastics, and some campuses offer reusable options. But across the country, American universities generally lag behind Australian and German institutions, where eco-friendly practices are embedded in campus life and enforced by state-backed policies. While American students carry disposable cups and cutlery between classes, their Australian counterparts seem to have mastered a low-waste routine, largely thanks to policy-backed infrastructure.
Up to this point, we merely reiterate problems that have been previously identified. But to merely comment on these issues would be documentation, not action. Thus, to make the Duke waste system better, here are various changes, from small to big, we recommend:
- Make the already present reusable containers a priority. By choosing to forgo the brief convenience of a single-use container, you would be saving, on average, 1.4 gallons (5.3 l) of water, 32 Megajoules of energy, preserving 29 ounces (1.1 kg) of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere.
- Separate your trash. All our conservation efforts are for naught if in the final most crucial step they fail. Americans generated 35.7 million tons of plastic waste in 2018, of which only 8.7% was recycled, with most ending up in landfills or incinerators.
- Choose to reduce your meat consumption. Jakob’s analysis of his meals across the past week show an average ratio of meat to non-meat of about 80:20; by reducing it to 50:50, leaps can be made in conservation. Livestock farming is responsible for about 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
- Control portion size, not one size fits all. Standard portion sizes often result in overproduction and waste, contributing to the 30-40% of food supply that ends up as food waste in the U.S. Allowing consumers to choose the amount they need not only reduces food waste but also minimizes resource depletion associated with unnecessary production, transportation, and disposal.
- Demand better policy. One of the biggest dangers in focusing on individual action is losing sight of bigger stakeholders. The university itself has the ultimate power here, and a wonderful step that would result in overwhelming change would be to ban the use of single-use plastics, including PLA alternatives. Indeed this has been done across the nation, with Princeton enacting a ban of plastic water bottles, bags, straws, and utensils in 2018.
So, what obstacles remain?
A major obstacle to implementing these proposals is that WU is made up of individual vendors. They all have individual contracts with Duke Dining and control most of the pricing and staffing. This decentralized system, integrated into the centralized system (food points, mobile ordering), makes it difficult to adjust things like meat-related food prices.
We cannot just deflect the blame. As students, we have a habitual reliance on convenience. Although we intellectually bemoan the dangers of climate change, we nonetheless use needless plastic because it makes it easier to take to class. The student body must choose to model sustainable behavior, just as Duke must choose to address sustainability through structural change.
For Duke and other American universities truly committed to "writing a story about saving lives and our planet," it’s time to re-evaluate campus practices. Embracing sustainable policies and reducing single-use plastics could transform university waste production and help align everyday actions with the grander vision Duke promotes. Perhaps, as Duke’s leaders urged, it’s time to rethink who gets to write this story — and what kind of legacy we really want to leave behind.
Annie Ming Kowalik is a visiting international student from the University of New South Wales. Jakob Hagedorn is a visiting international student from Berlin, Germany.
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