Tag Archives: Office of Sustainability

Sustainability Week Waste Audit

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Sustainability Week occurred a couple weeks ago, and among the many events throughout the week was a waste audit.  During the waste audit, trash was collected from various locations across campus, such as behind the library. After the collected trash was delivered, interns from the Office of Sustainability and member of Alliance for Planet Earth opened the bags and sorted the trash into different categories.  Among these were compost, recycling, trash, and specialty items used for art pieces commissioned for Sustainability Week. The recycling was further divided into Terracycle and number ones, twos, and fives because the Office has specialty recycling that the general campus does not. Terracycle, for example, recycles items like pens, empty shampoo bottles, cleaned out toothpaste containers, and more.  While plastic items with a number one or two on the bottom of the item can be recycled on campus, number fives can only be recycled through the Office, and these are items like plastic Starbucks cups. Straws, paper Starbucks cups, and plastic bottles were kept separate for different counting purposes and for art pieces.

The intent of the waste audit was to raise awareness on the habits of the College of Charleston community while diverting items from the landfill.  Volunteers sorted trash all day, but I only had the opportunity to sort for an hour before class. Even during that hour, however, I helped dig through multiple bags of trash, and I saw how much waste was simply thrown in the trash can.  Much of the trash consisted of food waste, single-use plastic items, and products that can be composted but were placed in the trash bin instead.

Sorting through the trash was very frustrating because it is difficult to imagine how students do not care about where they throw their trash when items could be composted or recycled.  Whether it is an issue of students not caring, not being educated, or a combination of the two, the resources are available to students and faculty to compost food scraps or recycle plastic water bottles.  Our campus even has reusable water bottle filling stations located around campus to combat the use of single-use water bottles.

People are interested in convenience, and students at the College of Charleston are no exception.  This isn’t our fault–it is the fault of the society that raised us. American society is interested in profit, and this profit is what fuels our country’s corporations today.  As discussed in the “Story of Stuff” video, corporations operate with the goal of creating the most money, which is achieved through our linear economy and the corporate control of the government.  How it is more profitable to create excess amounts of waste baffles me, but the concept of waste was really reinforced during the waste audit.

I hope that students passing by the audit noticed the amount of waste created by the College in just a few hours, and that the audit will help raise awareness so students can change their habits.  I also hope that officials of the College noted the event to perhaps draw connections of how infrastructure can be better adapted. Installing more compost bins around campus would be a great start, as there are only a few outside of dining halls, and more signage informing students of the proper way to dispose of their waste would also be helpful.

Office of Sustainability Litter Sweeps

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As I briefly discussed in another blog post, I had the opportunity to organize weekly litter sweeps for a month during my internship with the Office of Sustainability.  While working with the 71% Project, which researches and combats plastic pollution in the oceans, I facilitated four hour-long litter sweeps on the corner of Calhoun and Coming Streets by the library.  The 71% Project focuses on this area because this intersection was adopted by the Office of Sustainability, and its proximity to campus equates to most of the trash in the area being discarded by students.  

Volunteers during these litter sweeps included students from various organizations across campus, ranging from interns from the Office of Sustainability, members of Alliance for Planet Earth, and students from this class.  Thank you to anyone reading this who helped during these litter sweeps–they could not have occurred without you!

We began each litter sweep by meeting at the Office of Sustainability before walking to the intersection to begin picking up the litter.  As we collected trash, at least one person recorded the type of trash and quantity on their phone through the SC Aquarium Citizen Science app.  Using this app is not only helpful to the aquarium and their research, but it is also useful for the 71% Project to record its progress in litter sweeps throughout the semester.  

As the area where we collected trash was off campus, it was not surprising that the items collected in the most abundance were cigarette butts.  In addition, we always found many aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic cups, and pieces of paper lying on the sidewalk and in the bushes. Although there was a trash can located on the street corner, it was obvious that, while some of the trash might have blown out of it, most of the litter was thrown out of cars or disposed of after sitting on the concrete wall behind the bushes.  

It was very disheartening to see hundreds of pieces of trash collected from the same area week after week, especially as much of the litter was located next to storm drains which lead directly to the harbor.  However, a little less litter was found and collected each week, which displayed that the litter sweeps were effective, and many people stopped to ask us what we were doing during every litter sweep. Hopefully, seeing students collecting litter will inspire people to not litter themselves, use less single-use items, or pick up a piece of trash in the street.  

Organizing and participating in these litter sweeps every week really exposed me to the environmental aspect of sustainability that I am interested in: plastic pollution.  After taking this class, I no longer focus only on the usage and littering of the single-use plastic items, but the process of extracting resources, creating the plastic, shipping it, filling it with a product, and selling it.  As we have discussed, waste is a product of our linear economy because waste does not exist in nature, and this has really expanded my thinking about plastic pollution. While I believe that individual action and change is important and can have an impact, the only way we will be able to significantly reduce single-use plastic is by demanding better from corporations and policies within the government.

My Internship with the Office of Sustainability

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This past semester, I was a rotational intern at the Office of Sustainability.  As a rotational intern, I worked on three different initiatives within the Office, including the Cougar Food Pantry, the 71% Project, and Sustainability Week.  I worked with each initiative for a month in order to have exposure to each project and complete different tasks.

For the first month, I volunteered at the Cougar Food Pantry, which is a resource for students that battles food insecurity on campus.  Many students do not have access to three meals a day, so the food pantry allows students to come shop for different items like pasta, cans of vegetables, cereal, and more.  These items are donated by different organizations and students on campus through food drives and competitions. Along with volunteering during the pantry’s open hours, I helped stock these donations and organize the pantry.

Next, I worked with the 71% Project, which focuses on plastic pollution in the oceans.  Charleston’s location on the water emphasizes the importance of minimizing usage of plastics and cleaning up litter on the streets, so my main task during this rotation was to organize weekly litter sweeps.  Volunteers from the Office of Sustainability, Alliance for Planet Earth, and this class were instrumental in these litter sweeps. We also used the SC Citizen Science app to record the data on how much trash we collected before sorting through the litter.

Lastly, I helped with Sustainability Week, which is an annual collection of events intended to promote the different pillars of sustainability to students and the community.  I helped organize events during the week, along with setting up, attending, and tearing down events. My main task was assisting in organizing a Land & Labor Acknowledgement, which acknowledged the indigenous groups that owned this land and their labor that built the College.  The event included speakers and performances from members of indigenous groups, such as the Gullah Geechee community, and their words and actions were very enlightening.

I also had the opportunity to volunteer with other organizations on campus through interning with the Office.  One of these organizations is the Stone Soup Collective Student Chapter at the College, and I was able to help distribute the soup to students one Wednesday evening.  It was very interesting to hear the founder of Stone Soup speak in class last week on her inspiration for the organization and the way it operates outside of campus.

Working as a rotational intern with the Office was a very rewarding experience, as I was exposed to the pillars of sustainability outside of learning about them in this class.  Not only did I work within the economic and social pillars with the Cougar Food Pantry and Sustainability Week, but I also experienced the environmental pillar through the 71% Project.  At the end of the internship program, we participated in a synthesis module exercise, which tied together these three pillars by defining them and providing examples of issues within the pillars, such as greenwashing.  We also discussed topics we covered in class, like the Anthropocene, points of intervention, types of capital, externalities, and more.

My experience as an intern with the Office of Sustainability was a very positive one, and it exposed me to aspects of sustainability outside of just learning about them.  I was able to apply much of the knowledge from this class to take-aways from events and conversations with other interns. I highly recommend applying for an internship with the Office in the future because they are a great resource on campus and an amazing way to become more involved and expand your consciousness.