Recycling Process
The New Math, Part 5
A tremendous amount of the energy that we consume and greenhouse gasses that we emit worldwide comes from making “stuff.”
April 25, 2014
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A tremendous amount of the energy that we consume and greenhouse gasses that we emit worldwide comes from making “stuff.”
There is a new math of greenhouse gas accounting by which some people are viewing and evaluating everything. How do you use this math to show the impact of your recycling and sustainable materials management (SMM) efforts? And perhaps more importantly, how do you share that information with people not fully immersed in the climate change lexicon?
I would argue that any climate action plan that omits stuff – the stuff we buy, the stuff we use, the stuff we throw away – is at best incomplete.
Recycling, composting and reusing materials reduces or eliminates greenhouse gas emissions at various points in the manufacturing process.
Most metrics like WARM that address the lifecycle impacts of “stuff” do not include all of the ancillary impacts related to it.
There are over 1,500 4-year colleges and universities across the U.S. and almost all of them have some portion of their enrollment that lives on campus and has to move out at the end of the year. When those students move out, there is a huge surge of trash that goes along with it. At more residential schools, it is not uncommon to see trash totals nearly double the month that students move out.
Every campus is a little bit different. Ironically, if you break a campus down into individual parts (e.g. traditional dormitory-style residence halls, apartment/suite style residence halls, faculty offices, departmental offices, cash-operations dining, dining commons, etc.), each individual part is actually pretty darn similar. But what makes each campus completely unique is the combination of parts, scale of the parts, the overall academic philosophy, and the fundamental business model of the campus. For the next few blog posts, I am planning to focus on some of the biggest differences and some fundamental changes those differences bring.
This is an open letter to college students, their families, and their friends all across the country. Please forward this to anyone that you know who is moving out of a residence hall in the next few months or just as importantly anyone who is going to a college or university campus to help their child, sibling or friend move out
At every residential school I have ever worked with, the trash nearly doubles in May when the students move out. Way too much of that is perfectly nice stuff that is not deliberately left behind. It is left behind because it didn’t fit.
We talk a lot in absolute terms: “zero waste,” “zero emissions.” But what do we really mean? Are we talking about net improvements, or are we merely transferring problems?
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