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Plate Waste Data 🥡

Lunch line waste overview

Customer waste totals (biowaste only) are collected from four waste points. Waste details are tracked via the lunch line data (via each customer's tray RFID tracking, which includes what food did they take on the lunch line). ATTN: No cameras are presently installed, waste is inferred from tray data alone.

Both the software and hardware for the waste points are customizable / open source.

Resources​

Glossary​

  • Plate waste: Food served to participants but left uneaten on plates and discarded. May or may not contain (wet or dry) napkins.

Data​

  • real-time: Data can be viewed near real-time once a minute. Individual scale measures accessible via MQTT.
  • History: Data collected since 2019
  • Accuracy:
    • Uptime: Some days may require manual data imputing due to individual hardware faults or connectivity issues.
    • Individual customer total waste tracking is most accurate, scales are accurate to a few grams.
      • Dry napkins give around 3g of error.
    • Daily waste is not fully accurate.
    • Waste cannot be attributed to all meals presently and will be labeled as miscellaneous (Grill leftovers, Weigh and Dine, Cafe waste, other waste)
  • Notable shortcomings:
    • Data cannot tell if salad or main component was discarded from the meal, only which of the menu's meals had food components discarded

Sample​

TODO, Ask!

Data details​

Individual scales can be debugged:

Lunch line waste scale debug view

More details in: Restricted - Lunch Line Waste:

  • gotchas encountered during research
  • Raw data details
  • System accuracy metrics
  • TODO

Elsewhere​

Other customer waste systems and papers encountered in the wild:

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