As the country grows ever more environmentally conscious, a renewed interest in the recycling efforts on campus has spread through Geneseo. Director of the Office of Sustainability Dan DeZarn views students speaking out about Geneseo recycling as an opportunity to educate the entire campus about their efforts.
“It’s a time to recognize that students care about these things,” DeZarn said. “They’re bringing it to our attention that we need to do a better job at telling them what we do and that we need to do more.”
The campus’ Office of Sustainability was created in 2014 by James Milroy, former vice president for admission and finance, and Carol Long, former interim president, and has directed the college’s sustainability efforts since its beginning.
While recycling has been an integral part of the campus for many years, composting is a relatively new effort by Geneseo to form a more environmentally conscious campus.
“Myself and a group of student interns developed this particular program,” Dan DeZarn, director of the Office of Sustainability, said. “It is a grassroots initiative funded by the Office of Sustainability and the Sustainability Commission.”
While pre-consumer and landscape composting—such as broken tree branches or watermelon rinds—has been employed for many years, post-consumer composting is relatively new and has multiple locations throughout campus, which can be found on compost location maps in the MacVittie Student Union or the Geneseo website.
“Compost is a really important thing,” DeZarn said. “Compost is far more important than recycling at this point.”
According to DeZarn, the recycling process at Geneseo is far more complicated than the compost process, which takes place entirely on campus. Recycling is handled by the Department of Facilities and Planning Services and CAS.
“The college has a waste contract with a company called Waste Management where all our recycling is sent and then sorted,” DeZarn said. “I think it’s really important to mention here that recycling isn’t the answer.”
According to a recent study conducted by Poly Free Planet, despite 75 percent of people making recycling efforts, only about 9 percent of plastic is actually recycled.
“I think the most important reason why it’s great the school is composting is because recycling efforts, while important, are often unsuccessful,” English education major junior Cameron Luquer said.
The issue with recycling lies within corporations who obtain recycled materials because they are only driven by which recyclables there is a market for, according to the Poly Free Planet study. If a material isn’t wanted, it’s thrown in the landfill.
“Something that the Sustainability Commission is working on this year is to develop a strategy to operationalize composting on campus,” DeZarn said. “Because right now it isn’t operationalized, it is a pilot program run by students and it is very successful.”
The composting program that began last fall is run by student interns in the Office of Sustainability. These students pick up the green bins from their locations in residence halls, academic buildings and other buildings on campus, according to the Office of Sustainability.
“I noticed the compost bins last year in the residence halls, but recently noticed them appear in the Union and other locations on campus,” Luquer said.
According to the Office of Sustainability, the Department of Facilities and Planning Services is responsible for composting the waste, which is used for campus landscaping to grow herbs and other plants.
The opinion article raised a specific concern about how a larger number of compost bins could accommodate all the potentially compostable items on campus.
When the Office of Sustainability started up back in 2014, I was a big advocate for waste management on campus, handling the composting as a parallel waste stream to regular landfill trash as well as recycling,” DeZarn said. “There was some pushback. At that point in time there was a feeling that would be a difficult thing to handle … so myself and a group of student interns developed this particular program which started off as composting bins in the residence halls and that relies on there being a sustainability coordinator in the hall council of that residence hall.”
According to DeZarn, a sustainability coordinator in a residence hall is required for a compost bin to be placed there.
There are currently no compost bins in dining halls that are for student-use. DeZarn explained that although he thinks there’s a place for them, a lot of the compostable waste in dining halls accumulates before the food reaches the students.
“The majority of organic waste coming out of a dining hall comes from pre-consumer sources. The way that food waste has been handled in the dining halls has been to move [toward] ‘tray-less dining.’ I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve gone to Food Studio North, everything is individually plated and so the actual amount of post-consumer food waste is relatively small.”
According to the composting map, there are at least 60 compost bins located on campus.
Last year, the Office of Sustainability was able to collect about 7,000 pounds of compost, roughly the combined weight of two mid-size cars.
The Office of Sustainability is already engaging in other more environmentally progressive practices such as rainwater collections, operationalized compost collections and even starting to recycle kitchen grease to create biodiesel fuel.
Those who wish to possess a compost bucket can email compost@geneseo.edu.
News editor Emma Boskovski contributed reporting to this article.