By Christina Mehr and Brad Butterfield
Eventually, each plastic jug of vodka enjoyed the night before a midterm and recycled in a blue bin on Cal Poly Humbodlt campus grounds will be on a freightliner traversing the great Atlantic ocean, en route to a recycling facility in Southeast Asia. From there, it is processed and turned into Amazon packaging and may end up right back on your doorstep. The nearly 6,000 Lumberjacks on campus produced 169 tons of recycling in 2023. While the sheer tonnage is impressive, it signals a marked improvement compared to years past and has contributed to the university’s new bronze level Plastics Reduction Partner award from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF).
The NWF website explains the badge as, “[An] introductory badge, your university is newer to the plastics reduction space, and trying to get the word out about the need for change.”
Only one other university has achieved the bronze level certification, and no university has yet achieved silver or green levels of certification. To obtain the award, the university undertook action items which propel towards less overall plastic usage, for which they were awarded points by the NWF. Under the direction of Morgan King, lead climate analyst, the university engaged the campus community in outreach/education events, banned single-use plastics on campus, increased water bottle fill stations on campus, and worked with Chartwells Higher Ed to reduce unrecyclable materials used in the campus food service. Chartwells Higher Ed did not respond to an interview request.
“Over the past year, myself and Katie [Koscielak] in the sustainability office have been working with some people in dining services to identify alternatives to single use plastics, such as utensils,” King said.
The sustainability office’s efforts have had notable success, with a large increase in the number of locally compostable plates, utensils, and containers used across campus. An area that still needs improvement is the university’s purchasing of goods with packaging that is not recyclable, according to King.
“We can put some pressure to require that the packaging is either returnable or is made of a reusable, recyclable or compostable product,” King said. “So, that’s something that we need to start. We haven’t done much around that yet.”
Liz Whitchurch, Director of Facilities Operations shared that the university’s current mixed recycling contamination rate is between 14 and 16%. Using other local municipalities as benchmarks, this is a relatively low rate of contamination, according to both Whitchurch and Frank Nelson, assistant general manager at Recology. A Dec. 2023 study conducted by Harrison Chubb and Morgan King found that a recycling bin outside of the College Creek Marketplace contained (by volume) 57.8% recyclables, 15.7% compostables, and 26.5% landfill waste. A separate study led by King in Feb. measured the contents of recycling bins outside of the Behavioral and Social Sciences building after a one week collection period and found (by volume): 51% recyclables, 20% landfill waste, 25% compostables, 3% liquids, and 1% ‘hard to recycle’ (HTR) items.
In an effort to lower the contamination rate, the university is working to color coordinate all recycle bins across campus, as well as continuing to improve signage, according to Whitchurch.
As most consumers are aware, it is far from straightforward to understand whether or not your trash is recyclable. Like many of us, King can struggle at times with what bin to toss waste into.
“It’s extremely challenging,” King said. “I would consider myself pretty well versed. In recycling, but even I don’t know some of the items that are out there and whether or not they can actually be recycled.”
To add to the confusion, many technically recyclable items, like plastic berry containers and plastic cups (referred to as clamshell plastics), are eventually put into the landfill, as the cost of recycling the item outweighs the end value of the product.
“They’re not a commodity that can be sold,” Nelson said. “It costs more to process them than you can sell them for.”
Pizza boxes require preparation before they are considered recyclable. The wax paper, box support, and pizza leftovers must be removed before tossing into a blue recycling bin.
On campus, the massive task of sorting waste is done by just four individuals, according to Whitchurch, who added that she is looking to hire another person to tackle the widespread contamination issue.
“We try to pull out contamination,” Whitchurch said. “Our guys jump in and dumpster dive sometimes if they see something [obvious], like a big bag of garbage that someone put in the recycling dumpster instead of into the garbage dumpster.”
Realistically though, the responsibility of sorting waste into the proper bin is up to the campus community.
“Nowhere in the process do we pour everything out and sift through it and figure out what goes where,” said Whitchurch. “That’s just not a service that the university is equipped or staffed to do.”
Acknowledging the difficulty of proper recycling informed King’s ultimate goal for campus waste, plastics in particular: avoid generating or bringing these items onto campus in the first place. Paradoxically, this may be both the simplest solution and the toughest to implement, as it involves changing the behavior and consumption norms of an entire campus.
One successful example on this front is the university’s reusable water bottle fill stations located in nearly every campus building. Recently, the university has begun posting a Water Quality Report, accessible via QR code at water fill stations. King hopes this will build confidence in the campus community that the tap water being dispensed is high quality. Likewise, starting in 2013, the school’s dining hall, the J, began participating in the PlanetOZZI reusable boxes. These to-go boxes aim to reduce the amount of disposable to-go containers. The final cost of the OZZI box implementation in 2014 was $35,450.
While great strides are being taken towards a more sustainable campus, King acknowledges that the university is far from its overall grand green goals.
The tons of recycling generated by the university is eventually sorted by hand by 21 recology workers at Recology Humboldt County in Samoa. Humboldt County doesn’t have the high tech sorting machines that bigger cities like San Francisco and Santa Rosa do.
“We don’t have photo-eye technology,” Nelson said. “You’re not gonna get the latest technologies, because there’s not a lot of people in this area that are actually trained to install or fix [the machine].”
After the waste is hand-sorted, the glass is shipped to the Bay area and is eventually used to make insulation. Glass is one of the few full-circle products that is both recycled in California and then eventually sold again in the Golden State. Unfortunately, according to Nelson, aluminum, paper, cardboard, and plastic typically embark on much longer journeys to either pulp mills on the West Coast or to East and Southeast Asia. Once abroad, the waste is processed and turned into items like Amazon boxes. Nelson mentioned that pulp milling used to be done largely within California, but is mostly shipped across oceans to foreign countries currently.
“Through successive environmental regulations, we’ve reduced our ability to do what’s best for the environment, unfortunately, in California,” Nelson said. “I’ve got to load a container full of paper and send it to Southeast Asia. Even though they’re gonna be doing it ethically and responsibly, for me it’s like, why can’t we do it here?”
In any case, the university is making significant and methodical efforts to reduce waste of all kinds on campus, an achievement that is well worth celebrating.
“Cal Poly Humboldt’s certification is a truly significant achievement,” Kristy Jones, Director of Higher Education programs at NWF said. “With plastic pollution at an all-time high, the need for solutions has never been more pressing. Humboldt is showing firsthand that progress is possible, offering a blueprint for other colleges and universities across the country to follow. Kudos to the entire Lumberjack community for their hard work and demonstrated commitment to sustainability.”
A concerted, committed community wide effort is needed to reduce plastic use and recycling contamination across campus. Sustainability leaders like King and Whitchurch are giving the campus community a road map for success, but the protection of our ecosystem relies upon the participation of all.
“We don’t exist in a vacuum, we exist in an ecosystem,” Whitchurch said. “A very large ecosystem that has inputs and outputs within the system, but we are a closed system. We are one planet with limited resources, limited space.”
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