Eating Green

Taft and Aramark source food from many local farmers, growers, and distributors. The list changes with the seasons, and depends on availability. Local partners may include:

• Arethusa Farm Dairy: Litchfield, CT for milk and ice cream
• March Farms, Bethlehem, CT for fresh fruits and vegetables all natural beef, pork
• Ami's Bagels: Waterbury, CT

We compost food prep waste, wet food leftovers, and paper products from the dining hall. Students, faculty, and staff get involved through “Scrape Your Plate” education and initiatives. Composting and recycling now represent the majority of the school’s total waste stream. Aramark also partners with environmentally conscious suppliers who are committed to reducing source packaging, and recycles cardboard, glass, newspapers, magazines, plastic, cans and junk mail from all dining locations across campus.

Taft and Aramark consciously work to reduce water and energy consumption, and advocate for renewable energy sources and water recapture to reduce our overall environmental footprint. Aramark trains and updates their employees on common energy and water conservation practices every semester.

Tafties are encouraged to carry reusable water bottles. Our refilling stations across campus track and measure by-bottle output: In a six month period, more than 15,000 bottles were filled in our athletic center, alone. Thanks to calculations by Science Teacher Jim Lehner and his students, we know that it would have taken four barrels of crude oil—that’s 168 gallons—to produce 15,000 plastic water bottles.

Americans consume 400 million cups of coffee per day—the equivalent of 146 billion cups per year. If you drink just one cup of coffee or tea in a disposable cup every day, you will create about 23 pounds of trash in a year. In 2016 we removed disposable cups from our servery. 

Trayless dining has been a way of life here since 2010. It minimizes food waste, conserves energy and water, and reduces the amount of cleaning chemicals entering the waste stream.

We recycle 100% of our used fryer oil for bio fuel.