This project is intended to permanently set up styrofoam (expanded polystyrene, or EPS) recycling on campus, for the first time. This team aims to emulate a very successful program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and in fact this team has received some funding for student support and supplies from UW as part of an EPA grant that students and postdocs there have received.  The key difference between UIUC and UW is that UW had the benefit of a local styrofoam recycler, and this team does not have that benefit: the closest recycler is in Indianapolis and the cost of transporting undensified EPS is too high for this to be viable.

This team is establishing a partnership with Community Resource, Inc. in Urbana. They have agreed to handle·all of the logistics of picking up styrofoam from large containers ("gaylords") in campus buildings, transporting it to their site, feeding it into a machine called a "densifier", and selling the densified material to a company in Chicago. They will even give this team a portion of the proceeds from the sales, in order to support student interns on campus who will promote and support the program. However, this agreement is contingent on UIUC purchasing a densifier and allowing it to be placed at Community Resource, Inc., and the funding to purchase this densifier is what is requested from SSC. The goal of this project is to establish a self-supporting program that will ultimately capture 
most of the styrofoam waste from campus and recycle it, while supporting student interns to oversee andcontinually improve the program.