Last year, Dining Services began composting extra food from its kitchens—food that had not reached the consumer. Between the Village, DUC and Bear’s Den, Dining Services’ composting program diverted over 80,000 pounds of pre-consumer food waste from the landfill last year.

The new program, introduced this fall, involves Dining Services placing a single composting bin at the Bear’s Den dish return.

Dining Services chose to start the program on a small scale to work through any issues, according to Jill Duncan, director of marketing for Dining Services.

She noted that Bear’s Den was chosen to pilot the program because of its proximity to the Dining Services office and its accessibility to new students.

To draw attention to the program and minimize compost contamination, Dining Services and the Office of Sustainability have been working to add signs to the dish return area.

The University has also begun a “Compost Ambassadors” program, which involves placing representatives at the dish return during high-activity times to tell students where to dispose of their food waste.

If the University’s compost has more than a 10 percent contamination rate, it will incur charges from the composting company.

Students are generally supportive of the initiative.

“I use [the compost bin] whenever it’s there,” freshman Eric Neiman said. “It seems like a good program.”

Some added that composting is an easy way to make an environmental impact.

“[It’s] better than throwing [waste] in the trash,” he said. “It’s a small, incredibly easy thing to do.”

Other students, however, don’t find composting quite as effortless.

“It’s slightly annoying, but I still do it,” freshman Alana Deutsch said. “It just takes that much longer [to compost].”

While the University’s composting initiative began as an effort through only Dining Services, the University foresees a campus-wide post-consumer composting program sometime in the future.

Presently, however, the University hasn’t made any immediate plans to expand the program beyond Bear’s Den.

“At some point in the future, hopefully we can expand elsewhere on campus,” Sustainability Coordinator Will Fischer said. “It’s been a learning process for us…because we have to educate the community on what can and cannot be composted.”

“What we’re doing is trying to make a specific contribution to the entire dialogue about sustainability on campus, and one thing that I don’t think we have talked about is sustainable campus events,” said senior Jeff Nelson, Student Union (SU) president.

Senior Will Fischer, former president of Green Action, will be spearheading the effort to make campus events greener. Fischer, a senior, has been appointed SU’s executive advisor for sustainability and will lead the newly formed Green Events Commission (GEC) to research ways of making University events more sustainable.

“The responsibility for me is to work with Jeff on implementing sustainability at Wash. U.,” Fischer said. “We’re going to be working together to try and instill sustainability in the student body.”
Fischer will work with a group of other students on the GEC to research sustainable practices that can be incorporated into SU policy.

“We’re looking to build some system through which we can quantify whether or not a given student group is running a sustainable event,” Fischer said.

The commission will focus on special issues like using limited paper in publicizing and monitoring the sources and disposal of food.

“Mainly, we’re going to focus on reducing waste,” Fischer said.

Fischer suggested that alternative disposal options, such as turning unused food into compost, could eventually be used to take event waste “beyond recycling.”

After researching sustainable practices for campus events, the GEC will then submit a list of recommendations to the newly formed Special Executive Task Force for Sustainable Events (SETSE).
The SETSE will be co-chaired by Fischer and senior Trevor Mattea, SU vice president of administration, and will include representatives from the Senate, Treasury and student groups like Team 31, the Greek community and Dance Marathon.

“I know there are a lot of things we can improve on,” said senior Andrew Seidl, executive director of Dance Marathon.

Seidl mentioned reducing bags, serving soda in two-liter bottles instead of cans and using less electricity in the Athletic Complex as possible ways for Dance Marathon to go greener. He said he is looking forward to working with Fischer and the GEC in new these initiatives.

“I’m really excited to be one of the first groups to work with Will and to really get this off the ground,” he said.

After SETSE representatives from student groups and SU deliberate, the SETSE will then form campus event guidelines that will be sent to the Senate for approval as SU policy.

Regarding this phase of the process, Nelson emphasized that he wants to see the taskforce shape specific, concrete policies.