Trays

When you get done eating in the commons, you put your tray on the conveyor belt and it slowly creeps through the little opening. When you come the next day to grab a tray, it is magically cleaned, but how? To figure this out, I hired a private investigator that cleverly disguised himself as a lunch tray and jumped on the conveyor belt. What he described to me was beyond belief. Each tray would continue down the belt until it got to what he described as a giant French fries cutter. Every used tray was chopped into hundreds of small little pieces called “seed trays.” Then workers packed theses little chunks into small boxes with dry ice to preserve them. They then get shipped to an undisclosed location via a cargo freighter that has a much colder climate, where they are planted by workers into fields miles long. After five years of growing an constant de-watering (which is another story in itself), the seeds grow into plants similar to potatoes where a new tray is underground with a stem sticking up. The trays are then picked, cleaned and shipped back to Penn state where people grab them and use them, never to wonder how this simple piece of plastic is even made.