The USM Mug Club has made a difference on campus in the middle school dining room. Food service director Tony Pergande deserves much of the credit for allowing the changes to happen. Here is what we did. A year and a half a go, several students approached me to say that we were being very wasteful using paper cups in the dining room - and we were! The paper cup had a life or about 1 hour from the time it was taken out of its plastic sleeve, put on the lunch table, used by a student to drink milk or water and then thrown away. So we started a mug club. Students brought in their own mugs to drink out of instead of using a paper cup. The mugs were washed by the EAT club members and placed on a cart to be used day after day. We started with a few mug club members and it grew to about 100 in the middle school in the course of a year. This year, a cost analysis was done on the paper cups. It turns out the we were wasting many more cups than we thought. USM used over 225,000 cups as year at a cost of over $12,000.00. Thanks to Tony and some dedicated school parents, we have stopped using paper cups in the lower and middle school dining room and we now have reusable plastic tumblers from which to drink. Not only is this good for the environment, we have also saved money too!