North Carolina State U Begins Pizza Box Composting
The university's Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling implemented the Pizza Box Composting Project, which seeks to decrease compostable waste on campus and encourage students to pay more attention to the importance of composting.
U Colorado Boulder Partners on Zero Waste Sports Practices
Sustainable Gamedays, sponsored by BASF, is a series of eight men and women's basketball games in which videos featuring facts about sustainability and organics recycling show on the arena screens, and demonstrates to game-goers how to use the many zero waste stations placed around the arena for recycling and composting.
Georgetown U Distributes Recycling Bins in Dorms
(United States): As part of a marketing effort to increase student engagement, the Office of Sustainability has distributed recycling bins and educational fliers to all on-campus residents in dorms.
PepsiCo Spring Recycling Challenge Announces Results
(United States): PepsiCo's Dream Machine Recycling Initiative encourages participating colleges and universities to increase recycling rates by using its kiosk to collect plastic and aluminum beverage bottles and cans. The top five schools collecting the highest average amount of containers per kiosk are Mountwest College, Joliet Junior College, Rider University, University of Pittsburgh and Florida International University.
U Florida Student Spearheads Composting
(United States): A student in the university's College of Design, Construction and Planning has started a 10-bin collection system in an effort to promote the activities of the Student Compost Cooperative whose long-term goal is to establish compost collection bins across campus.
Earlham College Opens Free Store
Attempting to divert waste throughout the year from the landfill, a permanent collection bin holds the unwanted items until they are taken to the store where the campus community can pick things up for free.
Humboldt State U to Eliminate Plastic Bags
Beginning this spring, the university will not use any single-use plastic bags, and the bookstore, eateries and marketplaces will begin charging ten cents per paper bag.
Davidson College Diverts Waste from Athletic Games
After noticing how much waste from athletic events is compostable or recyclable, students launched two athletic recycling and composting campaigns: one at a football game and one at a basketball game.
Oregon State U Creates Trash Sculpture
Attempting to raise awareness of how much is thrown away, a campus recycling group collected and sorted residence hall waste to create a monster, and labeled the visual display with how much waste an average person produces over a certain amount of time.
SUNY Purchase Cuts Ribbon on Composting System
The new large-scale system composts food waste from the food court and the on-campus coffee shop with plans to collect additional waste from other dining facilities as the operation gets underway.
U Washington Creates Waste Display
The new visual display aims to simplify waste disposal on campus and encourage greater composting and recycling by showing the items for compost, recycling and landfill.
Sabah U Malaysia Opens Recycling Center
(Malaysia): In a strategic effort to make its campus more sustainable, the university's Environmental Management System will be trained to implement the recycling initiative, conduct an environmental audit, and organize the first regional conference on sustainability.
Antioch U New England Launches Terracycle Partnership
Beginning in January 2014, the university's Social Justice and Sustainability team is collecting a variety of packaging materials that are currently not recycled, such as chip bags and toothpaste tubes, in an effort to increase its waste diversion.
Bentley U Install Recycling Machines
The newly installed recycling machines accept bottles and cans, giving a five-cent deposit back to recyclers and displaying real-time recycling data.
SUNY ESF Students to Initiate Campus-Wide Composting
Students from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry are constructing a new facility for a campus-wide aerobic compost system that aids the composting process in colder months.
UC Berkeley Installs Recycled Recycling Bins
(U.S.): Agreeing to contribute to campus sustainability projects, the university's beverage contract funded each of the 13 newly installed, custom-designed bins, each made from 1,550 plastic milk jugs.
U California Berkeley Students Conduct Waste Audit
Striving to meet the University of California system's zero waste commitment by 2020, the recent student audit revealed a multitude of plastics in the waste stream. This new data will be helpful to the university's recent commitment to Plastics Disclosure Project, which tracks the lifecycle of plastics used on campus and pledges to reduce plastic waste.
Harvard U Students Jumpstart Bottled Water Ban
Student members of the university's Environmental Action Committee recently kicked off the Beyond the Bottle campaign with student signatures leading up to a ballot referendum to ban the sale of disposables.
U California Santa Cruz Holds Zero Waste Education Event
In a collaborative effort to divert material from landfills, the 2013 Fall Festival, which hosts a high number of new students, seeks to educate each other about the university's commitment to zero waste by 2020. The 2013 Fall Festival event diverted 88 percent of its waste from the landfill.
U California Santa Cruz Introduces Impact Award
(U.S.) The university's 2013 Chancellor's Sustainability Challenge inaugural Impact Award recognizes students who develop waste reduction/diversion projects, experience a deeper level of commitment, participate in existing programs, or raise awareness of the need to reduce waste. First place prize is $300.
British Columbia Institute of Tech Hosts Computer Reuse Program
In an effort to address the plethora of electronic waste inundating the landfills, the university will now be home to the West Coast branch of the World Computer Exchange, a service that will accept computers from members of campus or the community, refurbish the machines, and redistribute them to local and international communities in need.
Connecticut College Initiates Recycling Education Campaign
After recently observing trash and recyclables intermingling in bins across campus and to help end confusion about single-stream recycling, the Office of Sustainability started the Blue Campaign using billboards across campus to ask the question "What does blue mean to you?"
U California Santa Cruz Transitions to Bottle-Free
University Dining services announced recently that all Perk Coffee Bars no long sell single-use water bottles. All buildings where the coffee bars exist were outfitted with hydration stations that allow members to fill their own reusable bottles.
Clarkson U Students Conduct Waste Audit
As part of a fall class project, students separated the waste publicly in separate piles to understand the habits of the campus community. By way of this public display, passers-by were also educated about waste.
Eastfield College to Implement Sustainability Projects
The college's Green Team plans to install 16 water-bottle refilling stations in an effort to reduce waste from plastic bottles on campus; attach "smart heads" to sprinklers to conserve water; and create a new community garden project.
Queen's U to Place Recycling Stations
(U.S.): Sixty new bins, including organic waste bins, will be distributed across campus in an effort to make sorting waste on campus more prevalent and accessible.
Auburn U Reduces Facilities Filter Waste
After a recent partnership with a large filter manufacturer, the university reduced the amount of filters from nearly 30,000 per year to 4,549 in fiscal year 2013 leading to conserved electricity and monetary savings.
U Wisconsin Green Bay Composts Pre-Consumer Food Scraps
Attempting to reduce the amount of organic material it sends to the landfill, the university now sends all pre-consumer food waste from its' dining halls 50 miles to the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh for composting.
Western Washington U Students Pilot Rentable Mug Program
In an effort to reduce waste and money spent on handling that waste, students from a Campus Sustainability Planning Studio class initiated Project MUG this fall using grant funding from the university's green fee. Project MUG enables students to rent a reusable mug for beverages.
Sullivan County CC Breaks Ground on New Compost Facility
Food waste from two food service areas and campus offices will be composted at the college's new open bay composting facility. An anonymous donation to the college affords four stipends of $500 for students to operate the facility during the fall of 2013 and spring of 2014.
U Georgia Introduces Solar-Powered Waste Compactors
The university is co-locating its outside trash and recycling receptacles by installing 30 BigBelly Solar compactors across campus to make it easier to recycle. The recycling bins are set up for single-stream recycling.
U Maryland Initiates Post-Consumer Waste Audit
In an effort to focus their outreach efforts, facilitators of the ongoing audit aim to reduce the amount of trash bags used and increase the amount of composted and recycled material.
Alfred State College Introduces Waste Reduction Initiatives
In an effort to continue to reduce waste on campus, the college now works with compostable packaging and service items in its new Ever Green coffeehouse. Also, The Terrace, the college's main all-you-can-eat dining venue, now offers reusable takeout containers.
U California Irvine Receives Accolades from EPA
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently acknowledged the university for its zero waste and food recovery efforts. The zero waste program diverts 83 percent of the campus’ total waste materials from landfills by recycling, reusing and composting. The university has increased its food waste diversion from 90 tons in 2010 to 500 tons in 2012, when it joined the EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge.
Wesleyan U Installs Solar-Powered Waste Compactors
The university recently installed four BigBelly Solar trash compactors to increase its recycling rate and reduce the number of collection bins necessary, which also decreases labor involved in collection of the materials.
