Trimming the Fat: College Cafeterias Go Trayless

By Cree McCree

What’s Happening

• Cafeteria trays are going the way of ashtrays at colleges nationwide. Scores of schools have opted to ditch the Animal House icons to cut waste, save money, and make campus dining halls more homey.

• 126 of the 300 best-endowed U.S. colleges have stopped using trays in some or all of their dining facilities.

• At the Rochester Institute of Technology, which went trayless campus-wide, food waste has plunged dramatically, saving the school 10 percent in food spending—despite rising ingredients costs.

• Axing cafeteria trays, which encourage all-you-can-eat gorging, may also save students from gaining the classic “freshmen 15.”

What This Means to Business

• Waste not, want not. With endowments shrinking and student enrollments down, colleges need to conserve.

• Going trayless isn’t just about cost-cutting. It’s part of a larger trend toward greening America’s campuses with eco-friendly practices like installing solar panels and composting dining-hall waste.

• Institutional cafeterias are so 20th century. Small food stations with healthier choices, including vegan options, make students feel more at home.

• When trays go out the window, so does the temptation to pile it on.

Delicious Char on the Pizza Scene

By Katie Elfering

What’s Happening

• Wood-fired pizzas are so last year. 2009 is the year of coal-firing, a process that uses anthracite coal to get ovens to temps over 1,000 degrees.

• Coal-fired cooking is as old as America’s love of pizza—the first pizzerias on the East Coast preferred coal to cook their pies.

• Pizza blog Slice keeps track of each and every coal-fired pizza joint in the country. Its interactive map shows that Florida now beats out New York City for the most coal-cooked pies, thanks in large part to Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza chain.

• But it’s not just New York and Florida. Black Sheep Coal Fired Pizza opened up in Minneapolis in 2008 and is wooing wood-fire lovers to the dark side.

What This Means to Business

• Coal-firing is a long-rooted pizza-cooling tradition that isn’t lost on pie aficionados. For connoisseurs, the element of tradition and the skill required add a level of experience and enjoyment to the slices.

More Than a Mode of Transportation, It's a Bikestyle

By Sarah Barker

What’s Happening

• It’s not only cool to pedal, it’s fashionable. Cycle style covers both riders’ wear and riders’ rides.

• American Apparel sells a cape for supercyclists.

• Traditional wicker baskets are being embellished with flower arrangements. Marie-Louise Gustafsson’s detachable Carrie bike basket is not only innovative in design—it also doubles as a shopping basket or a picnic table.

• The Web site Polish Bloggers Cycle Chic posts photos of stylin’ riders, as does the blog Copenhagen Cycle Chic.

What This Means to Business

• Those who roll chic are customizing their rides as an extension of their identity. For conscious En Voguers—those with the constant craving for “cool”—style points are a measure that matters.

Negotiating Away Old Medical Bills with Web 2.0

By Hans Eisenbeis

What’s Happening

• A new Web-based service called IOUSOS allows consumers and their caregivers to negotiate pay-downs on old medical bills. Using an auction-like technology, patients and hospitals can arrive at new terms with lower expenses and more lenient repayment schedules.

• The service was announced at Finovate Startup ’09, the financial services industry’s conference showcasing technological innovations.

What This Means to Business

• Some observers say the Great Recession is just a warm-up to a catastrophic financial crash driven by health care costs. That may be a grim diagnosis, but it is true that 50 percent of all bankruptcies are caused by outstanding medical bills.

• More than 40 million Americans are uninsured, but many millions more are underinsured. That means they’re paying a larger chunk of sometimes massive medical bills.

• Most consumers don’t want to be deadbeats when it comes to paying their bills, but sometimes they simply can't afford to pay them off in total. A high tech collection service that allows them to pay something is a win for patients and a win for hospitals since a partial payment is better than no payment at all.

Google Rents Goats

By Josh Kimball

What’s Happening

• Get this goat story: Google has rented goats from California Grazing as a greener way to trim the weeds and grass in fields around its corporate headquarters.

• The goats are a way to naturally trim the green around the GOOG with a smaller carbon footprint than traditional lawnmowers. Critics, though, have raised questions about how eco-friendly transporting the herd to the Googleplex is.

• According to Google, the goats cost about the same as a landscape crew would, and will be brought in once a year to clear and fertilize the property. The enormous search company also touts the goats’ “cuteness” as one factor in their winning the job.

What This Means to Business

• Sometimes innovation means turning to the retro as consumers and companies embrace values of responsibility and creativity to solve problems.

• Innovation in the sustainability space has increasingly been built on adapting practices from the past to modern purposes, even if they at first seem off-the-wall.