Catering
Utrecht University works on making her catering more sustainable. Wishes and demands for sustainability are included in the contracts for catering. The university works together with Eurest and MAAS.
Read the article the Volkskrant wrote about the introduction of vegetarian lunches in 2018 (in Dutch).
The coffee that is drunk at Utrecht University is made of 100% sustainable, certified coffee beans (UTZ in coffee machines and RFA/IMPACT@ORIGIN in the unmanned coffee stations). The chocolate milk and tea have the Max Havelaar quality mark.
- Since the beginning of February 2019 you will no longer find disposable water bottles in the vending machines in the university buildings, instead you can buy reusable bottles from Join the Pipe. You can fill these for free with water at the coffee machines or a tap.
- Caterer Eurest supplies the water for lunches mainly in glass carafes.
Want to know more? www.uu.nl/reduceplastic.
The Educatorium restaurant will be the beating heart of science and exciting food initiatives at the UU. On the central Future Food Island Eurest will be presenting its sustainable, tasty menu to you. The Future Food Lab will be hosting exhibitions and activities around alternating food-related themes. Take a look at the wooden houses in the restaurant to discover what is happening at the university in the field of food and sustainability.
Future Food Lab is an initiative of Utrecht University (Green Office Utrecht), Future Food Utrecht and Eurest.
Other initiatives of Eurest
- The milk and buttermilk are organic. The same goes for the majority of the bread.
- Eurest aims at offering a vegan meal in the restaurant of the Educatorium every day.
- Eurest uses wholesale packs where possible in order to diminish the use of packing material.
- Eurest supports the initiatives of the Green Office as much as possible.
- Eurest collaborates in the yearly sustainable food market Sustasty.
- When university employees order lunches for meetings the standard is vegetarian.
- Eurest uses environment friendly materials and cleaning products.
- Eurest works together with fruit grower Westeneng in order to be able to purchase more regional products.
- Eurest cooperates with the farmers' cooperative Local2Local. This cooperative tries to sell products from farmers and producers to consumers with the shortest possible sales lines. Part of the cooperation between Eurest and Local2Local is the sale of products in the restaurants of the Educatorium and the Administration building. Among other things, jam, cheese and juice are sold, as well as bird houses produced by Reinaerde.
Other initiatives of MAAS
- The energy-efficient coffee machines with LED lights have an energy saving mode and a stand-by mode that learns the machine when it can switch itself off. This saves 139 kilowatt-hour per machine per year. This can be compared with the energy for a lamp for a year.
- The coffee machines have a cold water tap point where everyone can refill his bottle with chilled water for free. This way the university would like to stimulate that people no longer buy and use non-returnable water bottles.
- The reuse of the sustainable paper cups will be stimulated through an attractive design with name and consumption choice and a discount of € 0,05.
- MAAS executes its activities 100% electric and entirely CO2 neutral from the depot.
- MAAS cleans the machines with environment friendly cleaning products with a ‘cradle to cradle’ certificate.
- For every litre of water from the machines MAAS takes care of a litre of clean drinking water in a development country. This way, the university provides drinking water for 4.000 children every year.
- 99.14% of a machine can be recycled or reused circularly at the end of the technical life span.
- The machines meet all the requests of Netherlands Enterprise Agency.