UW-Madison Office Of Sustainabil
Brenna George (left) and Marie Faust, sort through trash from Science Hall last fall.
Brenna George remembers the first time she put on a pair of rubber gloves to look through trash. She had just been hired as an intern at UW-Madison and was assigned to sort through the waste coming out of Grainger Hall’s Capitol Cafe. George was disappointed to see the vast amounts of food waste and items that could have been recycled instead.
“I thought more people cared and paid attention to what they threw away, but when you really get to look into it, it’s not that way at all,” says George.
Trash auditing involves sorting waste from a particular location into distinct waste streams such as mixed paper, office paper, recycling and landfill. The goal is to determine whether waste is being properly disposed of.
A few campus groups have been doing audits, including the Office of Sustainability, where George works, and WE CONSERVE, a program dedicated to conservation and waste elimination. There’s also the ABCs of Waste, which launched with the help of Frank Kooistra, a retired coordinator for the Office of Sustainability’s physical plant operations and WE CONSERVE’s recycling initiatives, and focuses on reducing the university’s contribution to the landfill.
“It’s important to understand that garbage cans are not black holes,” says Miles Tryon-Petith, a former Office of Sustainability intern who founded the ABCs of Waste project. “Trash audits are important because it helps you see those traces of your lifestyle that you are sweeping under the rug, in a certain sense. The landfill is a giant rug.”
During 2014, interns audited 15 academic buildings sorting through more than 1.5 tons of waste.
“We did an initial audit and gave all that data to the building managers, then audited again to see if the results improved at all,” says Aaron Conradt, a WE CONSERVE student leader.
The 2014 audit data revealed a 23% average contamination rate in UW–Madison academic buildings. Yogurt cups, plastic food containers and coffee cup lids and sleeves were among some of the items improperly recycled.
Tryon-Petith says the data will be used to improve signs to describe what to toss where.
In spring 2014, professor Catherine Middlecamp incorporated two weeks of trash auditing labs in her environmental studies class. When the students dug through trash from a campus dorm, they discovered a large amount of cups, bowls, plates and silverware.
“They were losing thousands of dollars with items in housing being thrown away and we only looked at trash from one dorm,” Middlecamp says. “I believe the change they made was that no one can take [settings and silverware] out of the eating area any longer and that they also put a place to return those items on every floor of the dorms.”
Data from the ABCs of Waste also found that UW-Madison loses an average of $200,000 each year from recyclables thrown into the landfill.
Although valuable, audits have to be done safely, Middlecamp says. “That means you have to protect your hands, you have to protect your eyes. You have to be prepared for the unexpected and anybody who does a trash audit should really take a good look at the safety protocols before digging into bags of trash.”
While George says the Office of Sustainability plans to further investigate the university recycling system in September, it is unclear how many trash audits will be done. She hopes to see changes in infrastructure to promote recycling.
“I haven’t seen any improvement, but currently there really hasn’t been a ton of effort to add more recycling bins to campus, change the signage on them or make them brighter and different colors to make it obvious which bin is which,” George says. “Recycling is also not a part of employee training, so when employees come to campus it is confusing because the city of Madison is a single stream recycling system and on campus it is not.”
It’s also not a part of student orientation and many students come from municipalities that are single stream, adds George. “So people see a recycling bin and just think all the stuff can go in there.”
