The Collis Silverware Mystery

Environmental choices can cut both ways.

THE COLLIS CAFE is one of the most appealing of all the College's dining facilities. Much of what it serves is Virtue Food which also happens to be tasty. Drink a Collis smoothie (honey, not sugar, usually sweetens the fruit), dig into a bowl of one of Collis's delicious healthy soups, and you feel like, what? Well, like an environmentally minded gourmet.

All the same, some of the more idealistic students walk into Collis with slight frowns on their faces. Why is that? It's because of Collis's tableware. In Thayer Hall you get honest steel knives, forks, and spoons. In Collis you get flimsy white plastic. Of course you throw it out when you leavehundreds and hundreds of pieces get tossed each day. Not only that, each crummy little white plastic implement comes wrapped in still more plastic, which you trash before you even start your meal.

I, too, used to walk in with a slight frown, even though eager for the soup and smoothie. Not any more, now that I know the whole story. Now I wear a puzzled expression.

When Collis opened in 1979, it used to have beautiful, reusable glass bowls for the salad, and good steel cudery. (One of the funnier sights was seeing a student building a cucumber-slice fence around the rim of her or his brimming bowl, like flash boards on a dam. Then they could add one more big dollop of salad absolutely free.

That system lasted nearly a decade. Then Collis moved exclusively to throwaway salad containers, and to the white plastic cutlery. At the same time the cashiers also began charging for salad by weight, not by size of the container. That took care of the cucumber-fence ploy.

The main reason for the change, though, was that so many of the bowls and metal implements were vanishing that the cafe's budget was being drained. Where did they all vanish to? Presumably into the kitchens of off-campus apartments. Or as Linda Kennedy, who managed Collis through most of the '80s, puts it, "All the lost pieces are somewhere having a good re-used life." For that reason she was willing to tolerate reasonable losses. Some later managers differed. And so all the silver vanished.

We virtuous gourmets were of course distressed by this movement back from multiple use to standard throwa way. Cynthia Crutchfield, manager of Collis in 1990, wasn't delighted, either. She agreed readily to a test, timed to accompany Earth Week. On April 16, 1990, Collis laid out 1, 728 steel forks, 1,656 teaspoons, 1,224 steel knives, and so on. A bit more than six thousand pieces of cutlery. To increase the chances of its mostly staying in Collis, a little group of virtuous gourmets contributed a special (and rather expensive) garbage barrel. It had a powerful magnet in the lid. Reason: Perhaps not all the lost silver was migrating to a new life. Perhaps some just got thrown out. We'd catch it. Any steel implement dumped in the barrel would leap up like salmon and cling dangling to the underside of the lid.

It didn't work. We did rescue some danglers, but not enough. When the test ended on May 11, nearly a thousand knives, forks, and spoons were missing, and those knives were $1.38 each. Back we went to flimsy white plastic.

But the story doesn't end there. There are two more bits. One is that up until 1995 at least the plastic was lying openly in bins. Then came a flu scare at Dartmouth. In its wake a couple of health officials decided the flu just might get spread by grubby student hands reaching in the spoon and fork bins. So though cheap plastic sealed in plastic wrap costs about twice as much as cheap plastic naked, the College switched. I expect it was right to, even if the metal cudery somehow is perfectly safe unwrapped. Flu is serious stuff.

The other bit is that Collis could not easily go back to stainless steel even if it wanted to. The latest remodeling (a big success, in my opinion) had a budget of around $5 million. Of that, $22,000 was budgeted for the dishwashing area. Things more glamorous got higher priority, and the dishwashing area wound up getting $6,000. They're no longer equipped to wash a lot of silver. I would call Steve Edes, the present manager, a good environmentalist, but in this case he has little choice.

Well, I guess there is still one more bit. Does it matter that we're locked into throwaway plastic? I don't know. Even though I teach environmental studies, and have some practice in tracing external costs, I cannot be sure that real cutlery is superior. Esthetically it is, of course. It feels good use? In effects on the soil and the atmosphere? To be really sure, I'd have to know quite a lot not just about dish washing, but also about steel smelting, detergent analysis, chromium mining (those forks are stainless steel). And also a lot about how many white plastic forks a stainless steel one replaces during a long life, what the molecular structures of the two kinds of plastics are, and so on and on. One of the problems of trying to think environmentally is that full and accurate answers are so very hard to come by. Even when you mean well.