A recent audit of waste generated on the second floor of the CUC found that 83.6 percent of the material tossed into landfill bags could have been recycled, composted, or reused.
That finding was the major result of a trash analysis conducted by the Pennsylvania Resources Council (PRC) in March, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon Green Practices. Additionally, the 2024 Cohon Center waste audit report noted that across the university’s dining locations, “vendors are encouraged, but not required, to provide recyclable and compostable materials.”
With Carnegie Mellon’s distributed-dining model and without a centralized dish collection, the school relies on single-use cups, plates, and bowls. These are subject to possible contamination in recycling and compost bins when disposed.
Carnegie Mellon’s Green Practices program focuses on environmental and operation sustainability on campus and makes more effective waste reduction a primary goal. Deborah Steinberg, the Green Practices and sustainability manager within Facilities Management and Campus Services, has been working on environmental issues for her two and a half years with the university. She focuses on innovating campus environmental sustainability processes.
Steinberg’s outward facing role as sustainability manager is to “tell campus about all the great things that [her] colleagues in facilities are doing on the roofs and in the walls and under the ground” to make Carnegie Mellon a more environmentally sustainable institution, she said.
Part of the role of Green Practices is to encourage campus to make sustainable choices and follow more sustainable behaviors.
A major thrust of Carnegie Mellon Green Practices is its Green Practices Committee, composed of students, faculty and staff interested in the program’s green initiatives. The group meets every other month, co-chaired by Steinberg and Fethiye Ozis, an environmental engineering professor.
Participants are encouraged to discuss their concerns and ideas and to participate in events. A main event is the annual Campus Race to Zero Waste, a two-month activity encouraging students to “think about ways to reduce waste,” Steinberg said.
This year, during the final week of the campus race, Green Practices conducted a waste audit of dining refuse from the second floor of the CUC. The audit was conducted and analyzed by the Pennsylvania Resources Council (PRC), a statewide environmental non-profit aiming to create “a Pennsylvania where nothing is wasted,” according to their website.
According to data from the PRC report, the CUC’s trash compactor scale indicates that in 2022, people in the building generated “an average of 6.65 US tons per week and 1.94 US tons of compost per month.”
PRC staff, alongside Green Practices partners, collected waste from the CUC that had accumulated during a 16-hour period between midnight and 4 p.m. on March 20. Collection stopped once the staging boats (large, wheeled trash bag receptacles) were full, due to a limited amount of space for collecting waste.
The audit team collected and examined 700 pounds of waste material, grouping the collections into three separate locations: Schatz Dining Room, Au Bon Pain, and all of the waste from the Dining Marketplace, Danforth hallway, and the pool-facing dining room areas. The total area covered by the waste audit was approximately 17,900 square feet, according to the PRC report.
As Carnegie Mellon Energy Week, an annual conference of energy and sustainability leaders from March 19 to 21, was underway at the time of the audit, the team did not collect waste from the event areas so as not to skew the data with unusually high trash volumes.
“We identify waste specifically coming from Schatz so we can see how that differs from the other spaces because that’s a self-contained eating area,” explained Steinberg.
After collecting the waste, PRC staff and campus volunteers sorted it into 18 classifications. These included compostable serving-ware, pre- and post-consumer organics, liquid waste, and other categories of recyclable, compostable, and landfill-bound refuse products. The material collected fit into 16 of the total classifications.
Approximately 84.6 percent of all the waste analyzed during the audit was organic material. An additional 3.2 percent was recyclable and 11.4 percent was “final disposal,” or landfill waste that cannot be recovered or diverted.
PRC found that 51 percent of the recycling bags were contaminated. Most of the contaminants were liquid waste and post-consumer organics, which “impact recycling the most and represent about one-third of the total weight sorted from all recycling,” the audit reported.
This is the second year Green Practices and the PRC have audited waste generation at Carnegie Mellon. In April 2023, the team evaluated 913.5 pounds of waste material and found that 93.2 percent of the waste produced at the CUC could have been diverted away from the landfill by composting (87.5 percent) or recycling (5.7 percent).
The 2024 figure, that 83.58 percent of trashed goods in landfill bags could have gone elsewhere, is down from last year but still represents major potential for sustainability improvement.
A sticking point in waste misdirection comes from the containers given out at Revolution Noodle, both Steinberg and the audit.
“We have a problem with users noticing that [at Revolution Noodle] the bowl is compostable but the lid is not,” Steinberg said. “There is usually food left, so people have a tendency to put the lid on and then either throw it in the landfill or throw it in the compost.” Unfortunately, she said, that lid is non-divertible, meaning it must be separated and thrown away in the landfill bin.
The PRC report recommended that “a more rigorous standard be implemented to ensure that when a consumer within the Cohon Center is receiving an item, they can feel confident it can be composted.”
They also recommended that the university reassess the overall placement of waste bins around campus, continually update waste infrastructure, and “implement clear, permanent signage” to inform people about what products can be disposed of where. Both factors, the report noted, could have a significant impact on influencing campus consumers’ behavior.
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