Hi Daphne, great survey and I agree with Mary it is very comprehensive!  Patrick and I reviewed the document we came up with a few recommendations for your consideration:

It might be beneficial to add another question after cell G3 that asks if there are secondary waste goals.

Cell K3 was a little confusing trying to determine what was meant by ‘Benchmark Year’…. Is this supposed to say ‘Baseline Year’ instead? 

For Cell AG3, we are recommending that a separate tab in the same spreadsheet where the answers can be put into its own grid and easier to compare school to school.  For instance, I found it very interesting to see UIUC include tires but not surplus material, and it would be interesting to see how many folks include tire recycling/repurposing.  Patrick is going to take a 1st stab at creating this for your review.  

In the Waste Metric Tracking section, would it be possible to add a few questions around accounting for avoided waste?  Take-back programs would be a prime example of this… for instance, if a university handles furniture whether by diverting it or landfilling it, but then works with a manufacturer on a take-back program, do you get to count that material as diverted?  I am not sure of the best way to ask this question(s)… maybe it should be integrated with the matrix developed as part of bullet #2? 

The organics section might benefit by clarification on what should be included.  We interpreted it as more than just food scraps and included animal bedding and landscape debris in our answer, but questioned if other items should be included here such as food grease recycling.

Thank you again for putting this together.  Looking forward to seeing it once it is all filled out!

Thanks,

Tony Gillund 

Director of Sustainability

Campus Planning, Architecture, and Sustainability

o: 765-494-3911 | agillund@purdue.edu

From: Leciejewski, Mary <leciejewski.8@osu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 4, 2023 8:26 AM
To: Hulse, Daphne Lauren <dlhulse2@illinois.edu>; alisonlr@umich.edu; Anthony Gillund <agillund@purdue.edu>; nberg@umich.edu; Patrick T Brown <brown471@purdue.edu>
Cc: Szal, Dominika Patrycja <dszal2@illinois.edu>
Subject: RE: Purdue/OSU/Michigan/UIUC Waste Survey

Daphne,

Thanks for reopening the conversation and putting this together. This survey looks comprehensive. We’re excited for the results!

Here’s our quick feedback:

For “Waste Reduction Goal” section, add question asking if school has formal, published waste plan and request link.

For D5, we usually count interns as a 3:1 FTEs. Might be useful to make this clear or to have a separate column for number of FTE’s vs. number of interns.

For the Surplus category, I’d be interested to learn if other schools have internal reuse or external donation programs to nonprofits. (Our Surplus group has mentioned some legal/logistical issues with donation…)

We can make these edits directly in the survey but didn’t want to make changes without giving you a heads up/getting sign off from the group.

Once the other folks on the chain provide feedback, we can help disseminate to the larger BTAF group. When the results are in, it’d be a perfect intern project to assemble results in a slide show and do some data visualization. Happy to donate our intern time towards that task.

Best, Mary

Mary Leciejewski
Zero Waste Manager

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers 

Facilities Operations and Development, Sustainability & Strategic Services
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