Wartburg College
OP-22: Waste Minimization

Same year as other baselines in the STARS report.

Annually waste is audited, with the support of classes and volunteers. The audits are based on samples of dumpsters and grouped into building categories for comparison from year to year.

Wartburg College has adopted a Campus Sustainability Plan, which identifies goals, divided into eight sustainability categories. The second section, which addresses purchasing, and includes a vendor code of conduct. Part of the code includes several waste related points, such as Waste reduction, Packaging reduction, Use of recycled and recyclable materials (products, packaging, shipping materials), and Reduced paper usage (including e-procurement). The purchasing section also includes goals specifically addressing Source Reduction: a. Departments shall purchase products with a minimum of 30% Post Consumer Waste (PCW) recycled content for paper products or, at the minimum, EPA standard for other products or bio-based materials, when available and practical. b. Departments shall consider vendor packaging in their decision, with a preference to that which is minimal, reusable, contains a minimum of hazardous and non-recyclable materials, and meets or exceeds the recycled material content levels in the U.S. EPA Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines for Paperboard and Packaging. c. The College shall reduce the use of disposable products by specifying and purchasing products that are reusable or refillable whenever feasible and practical. d. Departments shall work together to order items in bulk when they can be shared or split whenever feasible to decreasing shipping impacts and potentially costs.

REUSE(D) allows students, faculty, and staff to donate or pick up lightly used office supplies. The program is meant to serve as an alternative to buying new materials such as binders, office organizers, and scissors. It also hopes to prevent individuals from disposing of items that could still be of use to someone else.

Our institution does not print the course catalog, schedules, and directories. We have made a very purposeful effort to enhance our website to support these publications digitally. The course catalog website, found at http://catalog.wartburg.edu/, provides all the information in the catalog, and can be updated regularly, instead of printing addendum catalogs. The schedule can be easily searched at https://my.wartburg.edu/ICS/Academics/Academics_Homepage.jnz?portlet=Course_Finder. The public portion of our directory, including faculty and staff, can be found at http://www.wartburg.edu/directory/. We also have a secure directory, which is easy to search, with photos and student contact information that can only be accessed with Wartburg College credentials. There is no printed version of these materials.

Wartburg does not have any amount of free printing. Part of the fees charged to all students allow for $30 worth of printing per semester. If students use all of this allotment before the conclusion of a semester they are charged standard printing costs of the print and copy center on campus. There is a discount for printing two sided, and all campus printers are defaulted to two sided printing.

Orange Move Out is an effort to reduce unnecessary disposal during the move out process. Donation stations are in each residence hall and movers are asked to place all reusable items there. Those items are then taken to Goodwill. In 2014 we added more move out awareness by encouraging students to give or sell their larger items to incoming students through a "yard sale". This raised money for a student group while diverting waste from the landfill.

For a week in November 2014 the main campus kitchen participated in a waste diversion study. We collected all waste that could be composted or processed through a biodigester, and measured it by weight and volume. This was the first phase to measure feasibility of food waste diversion.

Dining Services has begun implementation of a comprehensive food management system that includes menu management, production service records, forecasting based on past recorded use, recipes that are standardized to the serving, and recording left-over food in order to improve forecasting the next time around. While these practices were in place in the past, they were manual. Thus, the various processes used did not electronically “speak” to each other, and staff doing forecasting were required to pour through pages and pages of notes and use their personal recollection. Dining has already noticed that there is less waste, and less food left at the end of a meal (because staff are counting carefully, and thus, noticing it more). Actual dollars spend on food last year was actually less in dollars than the previous year. This is a direct result of the better forecasting and less waste that is inherent with this system. This new method of managing the menu and production is specifically designed to decrease food waste via controlling inventory, ordering, production and leftovers.

Wartburg’s cafeteria (The Mensa) went tray-less during Earth Week in 2008. This practice has saved thousands of gallons of water and has reduced the amount of water, chemical and food waste by thousands of pounds since its implementation.

No, Warburg’s health department inspector has said that they would not be favorable to that option due to health code violations it would cause. We believe this should not be applicable to us as we can not violate health code.

Our student dining facility uses reusable service wear. We have chosen to not use compostable service wear for retail dining and dine out operations as we do not have access to compost it. It would not be a sustainable decision to purchase a more costly product to just send it to the landfill.

Customers who use reusable mugs instead of disposable cups for fountain drinks and coffee receive a discount. The discount gets better the larger the container because it is $.99 for refill no matter the size, but scaled cost for disposable containers.

Food that is left, and is of appropriate quality is offered a second time. Staff are not allowed to take any food home, decreasing incentive to have left over food. Pre-consumer food waste such as egg shells, rinds, cores, etc. are collected and composted. This has been going on for over two years. Dining services makes most food from scratch, which means there will be unusable food waste, but it is not going out through the disposal and garbage systems.