UConn Sitting Alone With Four-Star Certified Green Restaurants Status

STORRS, CT — Guess the food at the University of Connecticut is pretty darn good ...

UConn officials said this week that the school's main campus in Storrs has achieved the distinction of being the only U.S. college campus on which every dining hall holds "the coveted Four-Star Certified Green Restaurants designation."

UConn also recently received top honors for sustainability practices at the Whitney, McMahon, and Putnam dining halls for reducing waste, conserving water, minimizing pollution and chemicals, and other environmentally friendly procedures.

The designation as the nation’s only campus with fully four-star dining halls comes about six years after it became among the first and only universities to receive at least one star of certification at every site.

Putnam received the University’s first four-star designation in 2018, followed by others in the succeeding years. With the addition of Whitney and Gelfenbien earlier this year, all UConn eight dining halls had reached the highest possible certification by excelling in hundreds of measures calculated as part of the review process.

The dining hall sustainability practices are part of a larger institutional effort at UConn to become an international model of sustainability in its operations, academics, and research, officials said.

The recently announced awards for the McMahon, Putnam, and Whitney facilities illustrate many of the sustainable practices that UConn Dining has instituted at its locations over the years. They range from trayless dining to reduce food waste and water usage to measuring pre-consumer waste, sending waste to be transformed into biogas and compost, recycling cooking oil, and many others. Dining is also the largest procurer of local produce in Connecticut.

See more about the distinction on the UConn Today site.