The Dirt on Waste: Understanding College Recycling Programs

In South Korea, a combination of grassroots movements and government campaigns have dramatically reduced the country's food waste by 95% (about 400 metric tons a day). Residents are required to buy special biodegradable bags, which serves as a tax that finances 60% of the city's food processing. It's a pay-as-you-waste tactic that also prompts citizens to find creative ways to recycle and compost, and special weighing machines encourage them to extract the moisture first, saving even more money on collection costs.

Loyola University Chicago's Searle Biodiesel Lab converts approximately 9,000 gallons of used cooking oil annually from campus dining halls and local institutions into 8,000 gallons of cleaner-burning biodiesel, which powers eight campus shuttle buses and produces 1,500 gallons of hand soap as a byproduct. Since 2013, the lab has created learning opportunities for students and operated as a financially self-sustaining enterprise.

Green Era's biodigester facility processes food waste in a closed, oxygen-free system that captures methane and converts it into renewable natural gas while producing compost. The system, which launched in spring 2025, accepts packaged food waste from restaurants, food banks, grocery stores, and residential composting services. The facility diverts approximately 85,000 tons of food waste annually from landfills and supplies enough renewable natural gas to Peoples Gas to power up to 3,000 homes.

The University of Georgia is working to make composting more accessible by offering various dropoff locations for compostable materials, such as the UGArden community farm. The university also offers UGA Campus Compost, which is a student-run program that uses e-bikes to collect compost bins around campus, making it easier for students to participate in in reducing their waste.

The University of Notre Dame installed three Grind2Energy systems, which aims to reduce the amount of food waste from the campus’ dining halls. The systems process the waste and send it to a local dairy farm where they break down the material to produce biogas that is used to generate electrical power for 1,000 homes each day in Plymouth, Indiana. While not everyone at the university has committed to the sustainability efforts, these systems can be scaled to be used on other college campuses.

The supply chain for Valentine's Day flowers is incredibly toxic for the environment and produces mass amounts of waste. In response, a "floral gifting" service industry emerged in which flowers from special events can get repurposed or recycled. One such company, NYC-based Repeat Roses, has a special service that restyles the flowers into petite bouquets to donate to hospitals, nursing homes, and family shelters. Their efforts have diverted more than 98 tons of waste from landfills and delivered almost 53,000 floral arrangements to people in need.

Les Alchimistes is a social enterprise outside of Paris that turns the 900,000 tons of food waste produced every year into compost that is then sold to farmers. The group is supported by industrial composters named Tidy Planet who have managed to speed up the natural composting process from 6-12 months to less than two weeks. The Alchimistes have six composting sites across France, and they rely on city cyclists to pick up the food waste from each participating restaurant.

Mason & Greens is a zero-waste store that reduces environmental impact by selling package-free items, from shampoo bars to organic produce. Dry goods and the wines, oils, and kombucha on tap are bought with reusable containers and priced by the ounce, which reduces plastic waste and allows customers to buy only what they need. In addition to minimizing products' carbon footprints, the store has been profitable since it opened and the owners say that, while prices are initially higher for consumers, reusable products may be less expensive in the long run because they don’t have to be replaced as frequently.

Alaska agencies are coordinating landslide monitoring through multi-agency programs, tribal partnerships, and citizen science apps, which has successfully prevented infrastructure damage (like the $25 million Dalton Highway rerouting that avoided landslide destruction) but faces limitations from funding uncertainty and the vast geographic scale requiring public education as the primary protective measure.

In 2016, California adopted a law to reduce the amount of organic waste in state landfills by 75 percent, which led cities and counties to develop their own organic waste diversion programs, such as organic waste collection and edible food recovery. In 2022, 11.2 million tons of organic waste were diverted, while 201,000 tons of edible food were recovered that year.