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.
“I can’t believe what those kids leave behind.” If you do enough end-of-the-year student move outs, you hear that statement a lot. If you’re making that statement to note the number of opportunities that there are to recover valuable materials, and how much of a shame it is to see that stuff end up in a landfill, then we’re on the same page.
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.
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
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