Students at UW are seeking to throw out old habits of throwing away with an initiative to reduce, eliminate or repurpose the waste on campus.
On Earth Day, members of the Campus Sustainability Coalition set up in front of the Union to demonstrate just how much waste the campus generates with looming bales of crushed cans and bottles, cardboard, recyclables and general garbage.
“We’ve been doing a waste audit all week, so we’ve been digging through some dumpsters around campus trying to figure out the composition of UW waste,” Presleigh Hayashida, civil engineering major, said. “That represents half a day’s waste that UW produces. About 9,000 pounds is the full day, so we have about 4,500 pounds there.”
As part of the audit, the coalition visited Washakie Dining Hall on Thursday to collect food waste from a single evening’s dinner to showcase alongside the bales. Students were asked to scrape their leftovers into prominently placed bins near the exit and the coalition came away with 170 pounds.
“We had clear bins we set out in front of the area where students typically just put their trays and it swivels around and they don’t see where all their waste goes,” Zoe Sherman, an energy resource management major and Environmental & Natural Resources minor, said. “It was kind of a visual for everyone to see what was coming in and out. Washakie seemed very supportive on it and they mentioned that it would be nice to have that for next year to show students.”
This step of the Zero-Waste Initiative comes with the support of ASUW funding, said Jahpeth Frauendienst, a double major in ENR and Environmental Systems Science. Frauendienst is the first ASUW senator from the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources, after a seat to represent students in the Haub School’s programs was added this semester. Working with other senators to pass a resolution in support of a less wasteful campus was one of Frauendienst’s first official actions, with additional collaboration from the college of business.
“There’s also some students in the college of business who are working on a feasibility analysis plan for institutional composting,” Frauendienst said. “The data we collected from this is going to support that and institutional composting as a whole.”
Composting, as a focus of the initiative’s next steps, is one of the most practical and attainable means of waste reduction, said Hayashida. The group hopes to present more solid data to UW administration in order to gain more support.
“We mostly audited food areas on campus and we found out it was about 60 percent that could be composted,” Hayashida said. “We are going to use the data that we’ve collected from that and the business class that’s doing their feasibility report—we’d like to combine with them and get concrete data numbers to support composting and hopefully start writing letters.”
Making more avenues for recycling and support for a wider variety of materials available throughout UW’s campus is also on the agenda.
“Recycling is a problem on campus that we’re hoping there will be progress in the future, it’s not our easiest leverage point right now,” Sam Richins, a double-major in ENR and ESS, said.
The board of trustees is also participating in the zero-waste movement by collaborating with the coalition for several zero-waste meals, data collection and a presentation about the program during the several days of the March meeting. The trustees were presented with durable, reusable bamboo utensils to replace plasticware.
“Those were a gift from the Haub School—kind of a thank-you for having their board meeting be zero-waste,” Zayne Hebbler, also a double-major in ENR and ESS, as well as a Zero-Waste Initiative intern with the Haub School, said. “They allowed us to present and they had some meals that were zero-waste.”
