Campus Sustainability Council and EnAct take on trash and water bottles

The picturesque Worner lawn became a massive pile of trash on Tuesday, February 2nd, as CC students learned how much garbage they cumulatively produce in a single day. Students donned plastic gloves and ventured into the 30 cubic yards of garbage to dig through it and sort out what could have been recycled, composted or reused. The Campus Sustainability Council organized the event, Trash Pile, as a way to kick-start a ten week college Recyclemania contest.

“It’s just getting in there and getting your hands dirty. You become in tune with what you eat and what you throw away,” said sophomore Molly Sinnott. “It’s very eye opening to see that it’s not even a full day of trash.”

Students were encouraged to grab a pair of gloves and sort through the garbage to get a sense of what percentage of the trash should have been recycled. After the whole pile had been attacked, they found that about 40 percent of the total volume was recyclable.

Though the Sustainability Council had intended to sort only enough trash to get a general idea of the ratio, students divided up the entire pile and all the recycling was able to be isolated.

“Students were so enthusiastic, they had it all sorted within a few hours,” said Emily Wright, the Coordinator of the Office of Sustainability. “We’re really pleased with our volunteer turnout this year, it was really engaging.”

The Trash Pile project was designed to raise awareness about Recyclemania, a two and a half month waste competition between colleges. Participating schools report waste data to the program, which uses criteria including amount of recyclable per capita, amount of total recyclables, amount of trash per capita and recycling rate to rank them. Recyclemania participants include 607 schools in 49 states, D.C. and foreign campuses in Canada and Qatar.

The Sustainability Council’s efforts this year are focused on waste minimization. CC already does fairly well with percentage of waste that is recycled. The Trash Pile was intended to be a real reminder of the amount of garbage the campus creates, and students agree that it was effective.

“It’s very in your face,” said sophomore Robin Walter.

Recyclemania and the Trash Pile come amid another campaign spearheaded by EnAct to reduce and eventually remove, bottled water from the CC campus. The effort is an environmental push against the waste of plastic bottles. As a first step in the initiative, bottled water is no longer for sale at Colorado Coffee.

The decision to phase out bottled water began as a process of surveying campus feelings about water. A survey of 200 people found that 78 percent supported the removal of bottled water, and 97 percent said that they bought bottled water only when they forgot to bring a reusable bottle with them.

“Given this information, we felt that it was necessary to begin some initiatives to get people thinking about bringing their own bottles with them,” said Carol Earnest, an EnAct member. “We felt that the best way to do this would be to take bottled water out of a food place that gets a lot of traffic.”

Therefore, EnAct arranged for bottled water to be removed from Colorado Coffee. Bon Appetit has supported the effort and allowed EnAct to place signs and an “installation” bottle of water at the location to explain their effort. Because they have not yet installed any alternatives, such as water filtration, bottled water is still sold in Benji’s and elsewhere on campus. Earnest also notes that drinking fountains can be found in Worner as well, and are more eco-friendly.

EnAct hopes to extend the removal of bottled water to the rest of campus, but they must first secure funding to provide alternative sources of water, and have no timetable for when that will happen. Earnest said that response to the effort has been generally supportive. She said she has received only one angry e-mail, which she attributes to a concern that bottled water would be removed without providing any alternative.

“That’s not the idea,” she said. “We’re not trying to take away good water from campus.”

“I think that creating an environment in which people are able to think about their consumer choices is a success,” said Earnest. “As for whether or not CC will actually change the world by not drinking bottled water, probably not, but it will help bring about knowledge regarding our production processes that we can start diffusing into our peer groups. If no one ever thought they could make a significant difference, than nothing would ever get done.”