Stanford University
EN-5: Outreach Campaign

Campus Race to Zero Waste is a national 8-week intercollegiate competition and benchmarking tool for higher education recycling programs targeting students, staff, and faculty. Each year during Campus Race to Zero Waste, Stanford reports recycling and trash tonnage and attempts to improve its waste management in categories such as total tons recycled, waste diversion rate, waste minimization, and per capita recycling. All members of the campus community are encouraged to participate and evaluate their own waste and recycling habits during this annual competition through activities and trainings offered by Stanford's Office of Sustainability and waste hauler.

During the competition, the Office of Sustainability also partners with the Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation to host sustainability game day challenges, where it engages students, staff and fans to reduce waste, recycle and compost.

Stanford has maintained a diversion rate around 65-67% for the past ten years. Even with the pandemic in 2020, we reached a 67% recycling rate. Stanford won 1st place for the Campus Race to Zero Waste's Food Organics in 2020 and 1st place for Per Capita Category for Large Campus in 2021.

Below are Stanford's final 2021 results in each of the RecycleMania categories:

Food Organics Analysis: 11 out of 103
Per Capita Classic: 3 out of 128
Diversion: 38 out of 103

The annual Cardinal Green Buildings campaign is one of the longest-standing Cardinal Green resource conservation campaigns. Stanford operates and maintains hundreds of campus buildings. While advanced systems ensure these buildings operate efficiently, a critical tool in helping further reduce Stanford’s energy use is the collective action of campus building occupants. For years, Stanford’s building managers have helped the university realize significant energy savings through the success of programs like the annual Winter Closure and the Cardinal Green Office Program. In partnership with Stanford's District Managers and Facilities Energy Management teams, these efforts were joined under the Cardinal Green Buildings campaign in order to call attention to the great work building leads are doing and to further engage the campus community in sustainability. Thus, the Cardinal Green Buildings campaign now helps promote Winter Closure both by working with building managers to curtail heating and cooling in buildings over the two-week holiday period and by promoting individual participation from students, staff and faculty to ensure that all appliances and electronics are unplugged during the building curtailment. In 2015 and 2016, additional programs were introduced under the Cardinal Green Buildings campaign umbrella, such as Thanksgiving Closure--a four-day shutdown over the Thanksgiving holiday. See more details here: https://sustainable.stanford.edu/cardinal-green/campaign/winter-closure-building-managers

Also note, the Winter Closure campaign has a strong student peer-to-peer component, which is described in more detail in the "EN-1: Student Educators Program" credit.

Winter Closure has resulted in a cumulative net energy cost savings of over $5.6 million since its inception. In 2020, a total of 155 buildings participated in the program for 3 weeks to save:

874,586 kilowatt-hours of electricity
4,954 million BTU of thermal energy (combination of hot water and process steam savings)
202,603 ton-hours of chilled water savings
$410,890 in operating savings
765 metric tons of CO2 emissions avoided