During the pandemic, the dining halls (sodexo) on the UH Manoa campus changed from

using silverware and reusable dishes to paper and plastic products. As restrictions are reducing,
students have been complaining about the amount of plastic waste from the dining halls on
campus. Due to the lack of space on the island for waste, the high amounts of waste coming
from the dining halls every day can be concerning due to the thousands of student residents
that dine in to eat everyday.
If the dining hall management puts more incentives for people to work in the dining hall,
this should increase the amount of people working in the dish room. Increasing the amounts of
reusable dishes from storage should decrease the amount of waste that is being produced from
the dining halls on the UH campus. If the dining hall also increased the starting pay for
dishwashers, this would make the job more appealing to students who are seeking a job
experience on campus. These things would ensure the amount of workers in the washroom and
also increase the productivity of using reusable dishes and decrease the amount of waste in the
dining halls to also decrease waste on the island and the possibility of the waste going into the
oceans.
The dining halls should make flyers with the position information, send it to the student
housing office for the flyers to be posted in the dorms on campus, and also have an information
sheet in the dining halls for prospective students that would either like more information about
the position or to receive an interview and also post the flyers to the Manoa dining services
instagram pages. If there were flyers posted with the information, this would bring more
awareness to students that didn’t know how the dining halls were run before the pandemic and
also encourage students that need a job to apply for one on campus. If the flyers were
distributed into the dorms, the positions would get more acknowledgements. If there were
information sheets in the dining halls, students would have the option to write down their names
and email addresses to be sent more information about the position and also set up interviews
for the job. If there were more incentives on social media or on the flyers, this should encourage
potential students or other people around campus to apply for the dishwasher jobs.
If there was more exposure to people on campus about the washroom jobs, this should
impact the amount of employees that would be able to keep the dishroom open. If there are
enough people per day per week to keep the dishrooms open, there should be an increase in
the amount of reusable products that are used in the dining halls. A lot of students don’t know
how the dining halls once operated before the pandemic so in order to go back to using the
reusable dishes, students need to learn how it was before in order to change how the dining
halls open now. In order to transition from single use plastics to reusable dishes, the
advertisement of the importance of dish room workers is important to gain more employees and
to increase the amount of reusable dishes.