Environmental issues on campus: Are you sorting your waste properly?
By KC Meredyk
On Monday, Oct. 23, the Student Senate Environmental Issues Committee held a trash-sorting event. With the help of Grounds and Custodial Manager Reed Richards, the aim of the event was to see how much trash contamination was occurring and how much of the waste in campus trash cans should have been recycled or composted. The event also sought to determine potential steps the Student Senate Environmental Issues Committee could take to ensure our campus is made greener. The committee hopes collaborate with the dining hall and other student organizations to find common sustainability goals to work toward.
Poster advertising the event. It reads: “Let’s Collect Data” “Save Your Campus!” Credit: Environmental Issues Committee
At the event, volunteers sorted through trash from various locations across campus to see how much was being missorted. “St. Kate’s has to pay by the pound for the trash that is brought to the landfill,” Luul Adam ‘25 (Undecided), chair of the Environmental Issues Committee, explained. “There is not only an environmental motivation to sort trash properly but an economic one.”
People participating in the trash sorting just outside the CdC. Credit: Luul Adams
Photo of trash bags on a tarp with a scale for weighing them.
Missorted waste has an impact beyond just costing the university more. Olivia Lien ‘27 (History/English, Linguistics minor) said, “The compost [for example], I go to the Food Access Hub, and there’s a lot of fresh produce there — I know other students use the food hub as well, the food is grown with the help of compost from campus.”
After sorting out the recycling and compost, the bags were weighted to see how many pounds were missorted. Lien humorously noted, “The cardboard soiled by coffee grounds was difficult since it was already disintegrating.”
Senate’s 2019 pie chart of the trash sort results. Credit: Student Senate
This year’s trash sort was 54.75 pounds of “trash.” In the trash, there were about 14.75 pounds of compost and 17.65 pounds of recycling. This comes out to roughly 27% of compost and 32% of recycling that could have been diverted from the trash, according to Adam’s calculations. Compared to a trash sort event in 2019, there was a 2% decrease from that year to this year in the amount of compost mixed into the trash, while the recycling amount decreased by 1%.
If you are interested in getting involved with efforts to make our campus more environmentally friendly, the Environmental Issues Committee meets biweekly on Thursdays 12 p.m.-1 pm. The next meeting is on Thursday, Nov. 9. If you would like to join, email Luul Adam at lmadam127@stkate.edu.
An earlier version of this article contained slightly incorrect numbers for the amount of missorted waste.
