Hello, All. In preparation for the campus building waste audits next week (Oct. 23-27), attached are instruction sheets for F&S BSWs at buildings that will be included in the study (BIF, CIF, Noyes Lab, & RAL). Separate, similar sheets will be sent to building contacts for those buildings that coordinate their own BSWs (Illini Union, ARC, and Allen Hall/LAR). Daphne had previously suggested sending these to both her and Pete since Pete might be out of the office. Macie, since I see Pete has an automatic email reply indicating that he’ll be out of town through the 30th, I’ve copied you as well; if there’s anyone else who should receive these in Pete’s absence, please feel free to forward the BSW sheets to them. Daphne and Macie, If you or any key stakeholders involved in communicating with BSWs have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me. In case you need it during the week of the audits, my cell phone number is 217-979-7345.

The ISTC team will plan to deploy gaylords to all buildings on Monday morning (Oct. 23). We’ll begin collecting samples from those gaylords as early as mid-day Monday—see the attached sampling schedule as well. The goal is to collect samples from each building for at least 2 days (dark green on the spreadsheet) with an optional third day (lighter green on the spreadsheet) if that’s needed to obtain adequate poundage for representative samples (unlikely but built into the plan nonetheless). BSWs are being asked to put trash and recycling into the gaylords first for as long as they’re present at the building, reverting to normal dumpsters/collection containers whenever the gaylords are full. To be clear, if, say, on Monday evening BSWs fill the gaylords up, they should not assume that they can ignore the gaylords on Tuesday evening. In that hypothetical situation, ISTC will have removed samples from the gaylords before Tuesday evening, so the BSWs should find that there’s room in the gaylords on Tuesday evening, and once again, use those first until they’re full before reverting to using the normal dumpsters.  I think we’ve conveyed that on the BSW sheets, but in case any of them ask any of you for clarification, I wanted to point this out. We’ll remove gaylords from buildings once adequate samples are in hand. When the gaylords are gone, BSWs can resume all normal operations.

The trailer is being dropped off at the Waste Transfer Station (WTS) this Friday, Oct. 20th, and it will be picked up on Monday, Oct. 30th, as previously discussed with Shawn. Daphne, although we had asked you and Dan previously if F&S might have a truck we could borrow for sample collection, we were able to reserve one from the ISTC/PRI fleet for the entire week for that purpose. As previously discussed with Shawn, ISTC is providing the gaylords, but for the pallets beneath the various gaylords, we’ll plan to pull from the stockpile at the WTS.

As Daphne is aware, there is a sign-up for volunteers to help with the sort at https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0F48ADAA2DA5FD0-44917798-uiuc#/. Thus far, no one has signed up; students often tend to wait until the last minute to sign up for things. Daphne, have you shared the link with the lists you had mentioned? I noticed that it was not included in the Eweek, so if you submitted it, they didn’t include it in this week’s edition, which would have been ideal. Thanks to Daphne, this did get included in the most recent edition of the iSEE newsletter. I posted it to the waste reduction and recycling Facebook group, to the PRI Sustainability Microsoft Team, and sent it via email to all ISTC staff based in Champaign (our director followed up with his own email encouraging folks to participate). I’ll also see if the Office of Civic Life will post it on their volunteer opportunities page. Please share the link with anyone or any group you think might be interested, especially interns or students involved in campus sustainability. We’ll have all ISTC zero-waste team hands on deck for this (including a new hourly employee we happily just hired) but having some additional volunteers would be helpful. And, because it’s common to have no-shows whenever volunteers are involved, the more we can spread the word, the better.

Thanks to everyone, and our team looks forward to next week’s audit!

JOY SCROGUM