Project Zero Waste

Project zero waste is to eliminate food wastage from residential dining halls at NIU, the leftover food will be packed and parcelled by student workers at dining halls, an hour prior to closing time.

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Inspiration

As a graduate student at Northern Illinois University and a student worker at NIU Dining services we have observed that we have a food waste of 10-20% at NIU dining halls on weekdays and 20-25% of food wastage at the on-campus restaurants such as Qdoba, Starbucks, Einstein Bro's Bagels, Three Sons Bistro at Barsema Halls. This made us think about how we can get this leftover food from being thrown in the trash to getting served to students on campus. NIU has close 15,000+ students in Fall 2022 registered students, so we have a good number of students here so as for the wastage - how can we make use of these numbers and better manage food waste and also optimize in-store groceries for the dining halls? On the positive side, NIU Dining services is making about $35,000 - $45000 of sales per day across the camps serving close to 3500-4500 meals.

What it does

NIU already has an application called NIU available on both the google play store and app store; the product has many features within itself to help students with their day-to-day tasks, however, we are making use of the dining feature in the app - when a student clicks on it it gets transferred to #WhereToEAT application which shows data about dining services available, their timings and payment methods available.

  • we are extending this feature by adding a dashboard where we survey the dining halls and make a list of the most leftover items.
  • By the end of the shift student manager updates the dashboard with leftover information
  • Students with huskie bucks, dining dollars and meal exchange programs will be known about leftover information - If they have saved their preferences, they get notified of their favourite food.

How we built it

A mass emailer will be sent to students with huskie bucks, dining dollars and meal exchange programs & a subscribe here for leftover food notification will be placed on the website.

A dashboard will be built across all the dining halls and restaurants available on campus, once the dashboard is updated with leftover food by student managers, it triggers notification about leftover items to subscribed students.

Challenges we ran into

The complexity of the APIs to link with the current NIU live website menu with the menu of each dining hall - as it needs to go through several security checks before we can go live, work includes collaboration with the Division of Information Technology of NIU and other graduate students.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the data we have collected from various dining services at NIU

What we learned

Working as a student worker and student manager at dining our teammates made us understand the scale of the problem we are facing and worked briefly on making the formal project scope and project charter document which is ready to be implemented by NIU, Division of Information Technology.

What's next for Project Zero Waste

Once this is implemented at NIU, it makes us easier to understand the situation and get this implemented at other universities with dining halls. We can also make this implemented at local restaurant chains and earn loyalty from customers in return.

Built With

  • api
  • dashboard
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