Last Wednesday, over 60 students, faculty and staff volunteered sorting waste from across campus near the corner of Iliff and High as a part of a waste audit called Mount Trashmore.
“Our goal was to do a one day trash audit and visual demonstration of how much trash is produced across our whole campus on one day,” said Sustainability Coordinator Chad King.
The decisions people make when throwing away their waste was a major theme of the audit, and King says one of the factors measured was how much recycling is going into trash cans and how much trash is going into recycling and composting bins.
There was so much waste to sort through, according to King, that some buildings had to be excluded from the waste audit, including the Ritchie Center, Centennial Halls, Centennial Towers and some campus buildings that are not as close to the central campus.
“If we were to have more time and volunteers, we would have tried to get to those buildings we excluded and do those counts, but it just became a whole lot of extra work,” said King.
The volunteers were able to sort through waste from some representative buildings, however, including Ben Cherrington Hall and Craig Hall. King said the data collected from these buildings will provide baseline data for pilot projects focused on waste in those buildings.
For example, King says desk-side trashcans will be replaced in those buildings with small half liter “trash caddies” attached to larger recycling bins.
“[The trash caddy] just emphasizes the fact that trash should be small and recycling should be bigger, especially at a desk,” said King. “It’s too small for a sheet of paper to fit into, so it emphasizes that should just go right into the [recycling] bin.”
King says he hopes the initiative will reduce the number of trash bins in the buildings and begin to create behavioral change. Another initiative, according to King, is making sure that trashcans are accompanied by recycling bins wherever possible.
“We want to give people the option of doing the right thing every time they throw something away,” he said.
