On September 21, UIUC sustainability representatives met with Coca-Cola and discussed the following:

Attendance: Sarah Carten, Liz Doeschot, Jen Fraterrigo, Dave Guth, Daphne Hulse, Shreya Mahajan, Meredith Moore, Shawn Patterson, Jake Slager, Tyler Swanson, Nicole Tate

• External ,eeting cadence: weekly or biweekly call with the high-level team, and a monthly call with everyone.

• Did Morgan move forward with the spreadsheet of UIUC and Coca-Cola contacts:

  • Meredith: it probably hasn’t been completed.

  • Daphne will complete it.

• Zero waste athletic events (Mercedes Benz stadium is best in class, zero waste in all facets, Atlanta Falcon):

  • Bins and messaging need to be consistent.

  • Journey there is very similar to here. It started with a waste audit and Circular Solutions for a closed loop system:

    • Circular Solutions will get far more technical than Coca-Cola will get.

  • Start off with a zero waste event, and use them as a blueprint. Their goal was a huge marquee zero waste event (March 2020 March Madness).

    • This event didn’t happen. But the time during the pandemic allowed them to work towards it incrementally.

  • Awarded zero waste in June 2022.

• For a zero waste event, consistent branding is going to be the most important part:

  • University of Washington (PAC-12 sustainability award).

    • Turn towards the student body for support, it is much more impactful (not self-serving activation, more engaging).

    • 2 full-time interns that focused on this programming.

      • Leveraged email blasts, athletic websites, season ticket holders to let them know in advance.

      • Created hashtag and shared results after (#CougsGoGreen).

      • Engaged student groups who volunteered to help with execution at informational tables (driving guest awareness, giving sustainable swag, helping with sorting after the events).

      • Opportunity to share videos? Amplify what is happening on campus already.

      • Zero waste plan:

        • Short-term: reach out to student orgs with a need for community service hours (sorority, fraternity, student gov?).

        • Long-term: Circular Solutions could identify gaps in sorting infrastructure and how to address the gaps.

    • Tackle concessions: most visible part of the operation, and it creates a lot of waste by nature.

• Feedback:

  • Jen: challenge is athletics not at the table. We don’t know if they are on board. We don’t necessarily have a good relationship with them at this point in time.

    • Nicole: this is not so unusual. There are a few partners with great cross-functional collaboration on campus. But everyone has different goals, different business units.

      • Recommendations: if the passion is around making it an athletic event (engage students, make an impact), step one might be identifying one point person at athletics to be the “yes”-er not even the “do”-er. If you can position this as “you can save time and energy if you allow us to set forth this plan on our end” can be a convincing point to keep them out of the minutiae of the planning. A second option is to start with a marquee student life event, than a marquee athletic event (convocation, commencement, bid day for Greek organizations)

• Earth Day would allow us a longer lead time.

• Jake will have a conversation with Marty tomorrow about this.

  • Meanwhile, we can try with the Athletics Board.

• Footprint: inside or outside of the event for a green team (swag, green team, get caught green handed).

• In venue messaging: throughout the course of the game, can there be half-time message, every x number of minutes or hours for a brief message? What can the DIA offer us?

  • Digital signage.

• Heaviest lift: strong recycling infrastructure.

• Ryan Squire: Executive in the DIA.

• Don’t Waste It history: concept was ideated 18 months ago. Trademark review and it passed. Ran it through trademark again, some other company in the last 18 months decided to use it.