UVA Has a Duty to Facilitate Students’ Waste Reduction
Photo by Gary Chan is licensed under CCO
Hannah keeps a fork, a water bottle, and a mason jar in her bag instead of using plastic utensils and cups. She carries around a compostable to-go food container until she can find a place to compost it. She forgoes products at the supermarket that use unnecessary plastic. She shops at Integral Yoga on Preston Avenue with her own containers for peanut butter, nuts, and other bulk items. She tries to avoid places on Grounds like Rising Roll, which uses plastic containers, in favor of West Range Cafe and The Castle, whose waste is compostable.
Hannah Umansky is a fourth year living in Brown College. Her efforts to reduce waste are laudable, but she takes on a burden that most students are likely to find unappealing. Hannah proves that it is possible for a UVA student to minimize waste. Why aren’t other students doing the same?
Each individual has an ecological footprint, and if they care about stopping climate change, they have a duty to act within their power to minimize that harm. But to say that students just do not care enough leaves out the structural obstacles to living waste-minimal, such as the obstacles students face composting on grounds. Ultimately, an individual is only as effective as the institutions around them empower them to be.
When 71% of carbon emissions are produced by 100 companies, it is clear that institutions bear significant responsibility for the climate. UVA recognizes that it has obligations to sustainability, and to some extent, they are meeting this obligation. UVAToday published an article on September 12, claiming that the “university is meeting [and] surpassing sustainability goals.” According to the report, in the last year the university “diverted 6,500 tons of waste from landfills, recycling around 44% of its total waste,” as well as composting food waste in dining halls. The Cavalier Daily recently investigated this claim, calling the amount of recycling that actually gets recycled into question. The claim in the UVAToday headline is misleading, referring to UVA’s goals in a vague sense, as it is not clear that all of these goals were met.
Alongside pursuing divestment from fossil fuel companies and aiming for carbon neutrality by 2030, a policy that students advocated during the September climate strike, the University also has an obligation to empower students themselves to live sustainably. Individuals do not act in a vacuum and even an individual sustainability can only be plausibly achieved if institutions such as the government, companies, and universities facilitate it. A single person cannot reduce their waste without an infrastructure in place to handle recycling and composting, offer recyclable and compostable products, and educate them on how best to reduce waste.
UVA boasts its compostable dining options, but options for composting around grounds are extremely limited. If a student takes a compostable to-go container out of a dining hall or restaurant, they have only three places they can compost without living in a residential college or using a meal swipe: Fine Arts Cafe, West Range Cafe, or the Castle. As of February 2020, UVA’s sustainability website has not even updated its composting page to include the Castle. Even worse, West Range Cafe’s composting bin is half the size of the landfill bin when the majority of their waste is compostable.
According to Anna Balch, a first year in the College, UVA still succeeds in several ways at facilitating waste reduction, especially through recycling. As a first year living in Bonnycastle, Anna says it’s “really easy to recycle” in her dorm, but “throughout the rest of grounds it’s a little tougher” since recycling bins are not widely placed. In terms of composting however, “the only place to compost [she is] familiar with is the Castle.” The Castle is the only completely compostable UVA Dining option, including utensils and cups; dining halls and West Range Cafe still have plastic utensils, for example.
Hannah also echoed the need for more composting bins around grounds. “The fact that they offer [them] is great and they should have more. All the compostable items are to-go items; the only place you can compost them is from the source where you got it from. If you leave West Range, where are you supposed to compost them?” Hannah lives in Brown where students have access to composting in the residential college, but other students do not. For example, a student living in New Dorms or Gooch-Dillard would either have to spend a meal swipe to go into Runk or O’Hill, or trudge all the way to the Castle for the closest composting location, limited even further by the hours it is open. The easier solution, then, would be to dispose compostable items in the landfill.
In response, Sustainability Coordinator Lela Garner of the UVA Office for Sustainability responded that “we are certainly looking to expand our reach around Grounds, but there’s currently composting offered in various cafes, workspaces, dining halls, and residence halls... While publicly accessible compost bins would be the ideal scenario, the issue of contamination impedes us from moving in that direction. If students, staff, or faculty are interested in composting, we can certainly work with them to see if it’s feasible in their specific space.”
The problem of contamination is not unsolvable. Contamination is a concern for recycling as well, yet the University still manages to offer recycling bins around Grounds. Hannah shares concern that students often do not consider their waste reduction options and improperly sort their recycling and composting. “People are unaware of the fact that you need to wash your recycling. People will toss half a Starbucks away, but then you just contaminated the whole bin and that stuff can’t be recycled anymore.” This problem could be easily addressed by a module, RA training, or orientation programs for incoming students. In fact, the University listed such education among its goals in its 2016-2020 Sustainability Plan. According to the plan, the Office for Sustainability was tasked with instituting “mandatory basic waste diversion education for new students, faculty, and staff with data from waste audits” by 2017.
This goal is vaguely defined and difficult to evaluate, but it appears that the University has not achieved it. Anna Balch says that she has not undergone sustainability education. Ms. Garner confirmed that this mandatory training has not been implemented, but she responds that the Office for Sustainability tables at events, gives presentations to HRL staff about recycling practices, and offers a list of commitments students can make to receive a “Green Living” certificate. Hannah Umansky is not swayed, arguing that mandatory programs would allow us to at least alleviate concerns about composting contamination. The University already imposes certain duties to community justice through traditions like the Honor Code and mandatory modules on sexual assault and alcohol. Imposing the duty of waste reduction awareness is no more demanding of students.
This does not mean UVA is making little progress. The annual sustainability report shows that a significant amount of food waste has been diverted compared to previous years. But absent from such numbers is, for example, the student who takes a compostable container from the Got Dumplings food truck to their off-grounds apartment and throws it away. The University could invest in compost bins in libraries and academic buildings, incentivize reusable containers, or even use dishes and silverware at locations outside dining halls.
The way that Hannah commits herself to waste reduction is highly burdensome, but this need not be the case. The University’s inadequate infrastructure is in part to play, and they have an obligation to empower students like her to stem the flow from student to landfill. Going forward with the new sustainability plan, when assessing how they have met their goals, the University should be more clear about the specific ways they have met or failed to meet their goals.