Now that summer attendance has dropped, do you still need the same level of trash and recycling pickup that you had in July? Have you met with your waste hauler? Do you have a plan with your waste hauler and recycling service provider to scale back on the frequency of pickup and/or size of your containers during the off season? Have you identified when the start of next season is and when you will need additional pickups again?

Orientation for new college & university students is almost here. Whether your orientation is a weekend or an entire week, it can be an important but tricky opportunity. At many schools you have every member of the incoming class concentrated into a handful of events or even a single event. If you can get into that event, or events, it provides a tremendous opportunity to access and convey information to the entire incoming student body.

Somewhere along the line we have become distracted by aggregated waste audits and national studies. In the process we too often miss a simple correlation.

Several months ago, I wrote a blog entry called “Knowing what you’ve got” to try to help people understand that recyclables are commodities and to encourage people to recognize the various grades of material they might have. However, in re-reading that post, I wanted to return to that topic to help people understand how to use that information to market their recyclables.

Sometimes timing is everything. Or if not everything, timing can sometimes have a significant impact on your program’s success.

For part 3 of this “Know Your Campus” series, I am going to focus on location. Some folks in real estate are fond of suggesting that location is everything. I wouldn’t go that far, but location can have a profound impact on how you manage your recycling and sustainability programs. In terms of location, I would suggest there are 3 main categories of schools: Urban campuses, Semi-urban/suburban campuses, Rural campuses

For this part 2, I am focusing on some of the differences between public and private schools. Every school has a complicated mix of funding sources, a lot of which I am going to gloss over (consider this the intro 100-level version). For those of you who are recent students making the transition to coordinator or who are folks new to working with schools, I am hoping this overview helps.

Student move out day is coming (sooner than you realize). When the students are moving out, where do you want them to put their unwanted stuff? How do they know where to go and where to throw away/recycle/re-purpose that stuff?

When you set up a recycling program, one struggle that you often encounter is that some people think they already know everything about recycling.