With “green” dorms and many green initiatives around campus, USC is certainly an environmentally friendly university. Its projects range from the simple, like recycling, to the more advanced, like energy conservation, as well as the use of “green” products. For the most part, these initiatives are in the background of our lives. They occur, and we do not think much about them. However, there is one initiative that has plagued my life since it was implemented: Carolina Dining and Sodexo’s “green” to-go plate.
Meant to be biodegradable, these plates are the worst, most inefficient and flummoxing “green” invention I have yet to encounter. First of all, if you order anything hot or wet, it completely ruins the structural integrity of the plate. Numerous times I’ve almost had a plate collapse on me, nearly sending my meal scattering across the floor. Second, the lids they give you are made of plastic. This seems to negate the whole “green” idea since you cannot have a to-go box without a lid. This makes me wonder, what’s the point of going “green” if the lid isn’t also biodegradable? Third, these plastic, nongreen lids don’t even latch onto the plates correctly. When they do latch, the connection is weak, and the lids can easily come off, leaving the potential for messy repercussions.
The combination of a collapsing plate and a terrible lid led to the passenger seat of my car being covered in gravy on my way home Sunday night, which made me start to think about all of our “green” innovations. I love the earth, no doubt about that, and I do think we should be trying to go “green” and reduce waste wherever possible. I don’t mind going out of my way to recycle or switching out the types of light bulbs in my house. I don’t even mind spending a couple extra cents in order to do so. However, for an environmentally friendly innovation to be worthwhile, it shouldn’t cause disruptive problems for the consumer. Naturally, a green initiative might cause a change in routine, but these are normal occurrences for when things change. It is when these changes start to annoy or cause problems for the consumer that an initiative has failed and is no longer worthwhile. Not only is it not beneficial for the consumer to use, but it could also cause backlash to the entire green movement. If people start to see green initiatives as a nuisance to them, they will begin to see all environmentally friendly proposals as problems and they will be unlikely to support green initiatives in the future, even if they are very helpful to not only the environment but to people as well.
This is something USC and Sodexo may want to consider as they continue to use their “environmentally friendly” plates. I certainly am getting fed up with them to the point where I may start taking their real plates to go, and I’m pretty sure Carolina Dining won’t be too happy about that.
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