Refuse, re-use, recycle:

• Refuse conspicuous consumption and the urge to always purchase new goods. There is almost always an alternative to buying a new product from a manufacturer or retailer.

• Re-use your things until they are beyond use. When you are done using your stuff, give it to someone else who can use it or donate it. If all else fails…

• Take the little bit of extra time to recycle your things properly. If you are not sure how to recycle, reach out to university or municipal resources. There are many outlets for information on how to properly dispose of anything from packaging materials to batteries and everything in between. 

 The Waste Prevention Campaign seeks to help everyone understand their relationship with their waste, or that they have one to begin with. It has been made so easy to toss anything and everything into wastebaskets that we treat our trash bins like a black hole. In order to help others understand that landfills are finite spaces which do not have the capacity to store any material we want to educate the student body on where their waste goes, how to properly sort material that cannot be re-used and instill a culture of want not waste not.

         Our campaign has worked with Dining Services to perform dining hall waste audits. This is where, for a two hour period we collect all the leftover food from each students’ plate. At the end, we weigh all the food and then display all the wasted food in the dining hall later in the evening to educate students on the waste stream they all participate in.  Our campaign can coordinate your involvement in these efforts as well.

• In the past waste audits, we have found that for a 2-hour lunch period in college 9/10 and Crown/Merrill Dining Halls, 60-100 pounds of food waste is tossed! 
• Although we do have a compost system set up, if we weren’t wasting roughly 10% of our food to begin with we wouldn’t have the need to truck compost off our campus by the ton everyday (and using diesel.) 
• Dining services is always looking for volunteers to work 2 hour shifts in scraping plates and tabling with the results of the weigh in various dining halls throughout the year. 

   
     Additionally, Waste Prevention works with the Summer Orientation in regards to the Sustainable Programming.  The Student Environmental Center has been collaborating with the orientations office for the past 4 years to ensure each session is a “zero-waste” event, the attendees are served an organic and mostly locally grown lunch as well as distribute re-usable tote bags to each incoming student.