UB’s zero waste efforts to ramp up in months to come

Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a two-part story informing the campus community of the university’s zero waste plans.

Inside Modern Disposal Services’ Buffalo Recycling Enterprises (BRE) facility in South Buffalo, conveyor belts hum at dizzying speeds as a rainbow of plastics, cardboard pieces and metals whip by. The machines do the bulk of the work, but manual sorters constantly pluck items off the belts, ensuring they find their way to the right product stream within the facility.

This is where UB’s recycling — all those yogurt containers, pizza boxes, bottles and cans and printouts — goes each week. The facility processes an average of 300 to 400 tons of recyclable materials a day from UB and municipalities across the region.

And it’s a vital partner in UB’s zero waste and circularity efforts. In the years to come, UB plans to send even more material to facilities like BRE’s as it seeks to achieve a 90% waste diversion rate — the percentage of materials that is not sent to landfills or incinerated — by 2030.

Plans are already underway to begin implementing new measures that will help UB reach this goal. They include new systems to collect recycling, organics and trash located in central communal areas to which students and employees will bring and sort their materials; the end of single-use plastics; and the adoption of compostable to-go food packaging.

It’s part of UB’s 10 in 10, a roadmap of innovative steps the university is advancing to increase its climate action efforts on the path to becoming climate neutral.

“Our waste is usually not the first thing that comes to mind when people think about climate action,” says Laura Hubbard, vice president for finance and administration. “But it has a huge impact on our footprint, as well as on the way we operate and the aesthetics of our campus. The strategic work we have undertaken provides a clear roadmap of how we can achieve zero waste while also increasing our efficiency and improving the campus experience for students, staff and faculty.”

To get the process started, UB contracted with Resource Recycling Systems (RRS). RRS representatives visited campus in summer 2023 to begin work on a detailed report to help UB determine the scope of campus waste, better understand the waste generated and alternatives to disposal, and identify strategic areas to guide UB’s zero-waste-by-2030 goal. This work built upon ongoing efforts first outlined in a 2019 internal report focused on circularity planning and zero-waste operations.

The university’s work resulted in a detailed report — over 130 pages in its entirety — the executive summary of which is available on the UB Climate Action Plan website. The report provides 10 priorities to implement over the next six years, all housed within five key areas: collection and infrastructure; reduction, recovery and sustainability; education and outreach; end markets; and design standards, protocols and policies.

Developing the strategy also included conducting a waste audit on campus last fall that identified several missed opportunities. Most notably, an audit of UB’s recycling stream found that 24% of the material should have been disposed of as trash (it was not recyclable) and 9% of the recycling stream had potential to be composted; meanwhile, 18% of the trash stream should have been recycled and 23% had potential to be composted.

“The waste audit gave us more data on waste on campus than we’ve ever had,” says Erin Moscati, UB Sustainability’s zero waste manager and, arguably, the one person on campus who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about garbage. “We did a deep dive on the data and now we have clear implementation plans tied to specific timelines on how we can move UB toward that 90% diversion rate over the next six years.”

Getting to that point is much more involved than simply rolling out new recycling bins, according to Stacey Modicamore, assistant director of building and grounds in UB Facilities. “We’re trying to do things in a thoughtful way so that we can implement our plan in a comprehensive way rather than focusing on microefforts or one-offs,” Modicamore says.

In addition to the work outlined in the report, university leaders are working with UB’s Purchasing and Contract Services to infuse circular principles into business services.

So, what does this all mean for folks on campus? The Recycle/Organics/Trash (R/O/T) bins located in One World Café on the North Campus offer a glimpse at where the university is headed with its zero waste and circularity plan.

More on that when the second part of this story runs when UBNow resumes publication in early January.