Portland Community College
OP-18: Waste Diversion

1. PCC has an extensive material surplus property department manged under our Central Distribution Services. This department is responsible gathering items across the district that are to be donated, recycled, re-sold and reused. The items are typically the larger, unwanted college supplies that would otherwise be land-filled. These item include, but are not limited to automobiles, computer electronics, all types of office furniture, aviation equipment, fire trucks, grounds maintenance machinery, AV equipment, and others. 2. PCC holds an annual eCycles Drive every May (http://www.pcc.edu/about/sustainability/events/ecycle/). This event is open to all faculty, staff, students, and the general public. In 2010, our event brought in over 580 different car-loads of material to be dropped off and properly recycled. This event is accomplished through a wonderful partnership with a local electronics recycling vendor, Total Reclaim. 3. One of our four main campuses, PCC Rock Creek, executes multiple on-site composting operations that are not captured with our typical hauling services (i.e. we do not have exact weights of the diverted material because we are doing this through student and staff led initiative). The Rock Creek Campus has one industrial-scale vermicomposting unit and one in-vessel composting unit called, "The Rocket." Both of these units take pre-consumer and post-consumer food waste from our cafeteria daily. More information on our on-site food composting efforts can be found at: http://www.pcc.edu/about/sustainability/on-campus/rock-creek.html. 4. The PCC Grounds department has substantial yard debris composting operations at both the PCC Sylvania and Rock Creek Campuses. All yard debris is gathered, processed and composted on-site at these campuses. The output, mulch, is ready and applied to the grounds every three years as landscaping and beautification at both campuses. 5. All of the PCC campuses that provide in-house dinning services (3 in total; Cascade, Rock Creek, Sylvania) capture and divert their used cooking oil. The used cooking oil is stored in 50 gallon drums and picked up by a vendor to be processed and turned into bio-fuel. The amount of cooking oil diverted per year varies around three (3) to four (4) tons per year.