On April 25th, the Zero Waste iCAP team met to discuss the State Farm Center Recycling (ZW011) recommendation and brainstorm on the Zero Waste iCAP summary report for the 22-23 FY.
Meeting minutes are attached.
On December 8th, the Zero Waste iCAP team met to discuss a new approach to creating recommendations for next semester. During the meeting, the team created subcommittees based on aspects of the key priorities document and provided feedback on an environmental engineering sustainability project.
Meeting minutes are attached.
On November 7th, the Zero Waste iCAP team met to discuss DIA sustainability initiatives with Tim Knox and made edits on the Project 4 Less expansion recommendation to be submitted in the coming month(s).
Meeting minutes are attached.
Click here to read the "Our Campus Composts" case review of institutions that compost, per the Composting Council in 2018-2019.
The Zero Waste iCAP Team met on Thursday, January 27 to finalize the recommendations drafted at the end of last semester, the Water Drinking Behavior Survey and the Water Filter System Tracking. The team also discussed several recommendations they intend to pursue this semester, including: Adopt-a-Highway program, Food Literacy Project, Composting Committee, P Card Training and Sustainable Receipt options. Meeting minutes are attached.
True food circularity must include waste reduction on the agricultural and consumer sides. Don't miss this third iSEE Congress webinar on "Circular Food Systems," with Brian Roe, Van Buren Professor of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State; and Tom Theis, Director of The Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago. Register here >>>
November 3, 12–1 pm • Zoom webinar
Julie Wurth • Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment
"How Can We Reduce Waste from Agricultural and Food Systems?"
Roman Makhnenko explains that there are available funds from a SSC sponsored project that can be used to to buy a compost tumbler for the Newmark Civil Engineering Building. Additionally, Roman wants to discuss with Meredith where the tumbler should be emptied once it gets full.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In an effort to be more “green” today and every day, we now have a compost tumbler on the west side of the National Soybean Research Center, thanks to SSC funding. This is the first publicly-accessible compost drop-off on campus!
Please feel free to take advantage of this opportunity to sustainably dispose of your fruit/vegetable scraps (without stickers), tea bags, coffee grounds/filters, eggshells, shredded paper etc. While this 60-gallon compost tumbler is housed at the NSRC building, this drop-off opportunity is available to all. Simply unscrew either end of the tumbler and drop your items inside. Attached are several photos of the location and setup, as well as a list of the acceptable/unacceptable items.
The end-product will ultimately be used to fertilize a pollinator garden at NSRC. More details to come.
The Zero Waste SWATeam met on Friday, 12 February to discuss the following:
Attached are the meeting minutes from the Zero Waste SWATeam on 12/18/2020. The following agenda items were discussed:
Attached are the meeting minutes and chat from the Zero Waste SWATeam meeting on 10/16.
Discussed were the following topics:
Reducing Food Waste
Vending Machine Alternatives to Single-use plastics
Plastic Recovery
Single Use Plastics
Illini Union Shadowbox attachment
Food Literacy Project
Attached is the final draft of the recommended 2020 iCAP objectives from the Zero Waste SWATeam.
Any meeting minutes from October 2019 or November 2019 may reference the following categories:
There will be a revised version by the end of the 2019 Fall Semester after iWG gives feedback for the SWATeams to revise.
On November 12, 2018, Sarthak Prasad from Illinois Sustainable Technology Center (ISTC) presented a Food Waste Management study to compare the current mode of food waste management (EnviroPure) with 7 other food waste management equipment.
He recommended the Housing at UofI switched from the EnviroPure systems to InSinkerator's Grind2Energy systems as food waste processing system, before sending the processed food waste (in slurry form) to the Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District (UCSD) in Urbana, IL. UCSD's Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) has existing anaerobic digesters that can convert food waste into valuable biogas for electricity generation.
See attached the presentation in PDF form and the detailed cost analysis.
Lance Schideman, Morgan White, Linhan Yang, Manying Zhang, and Kulsoom Abbas met to discuss progress on the projections of total food waste by building on campus. We will adjust the total estimated, based on population changes over the course of the year.
Matt Turino at the Sustainable Student Farm provided this overview of the food waste handling / transportation related to the Vermicompost project.
"So we only collected Pre-consumer waste from Busey-Evans so only the things that were cut off the usuable parts of vegetables and fruits. We had special 30 gallon trash cans that only existed in the kitchen of the Busey-Evans so there was almost never other kinds of trash. If we saw some while handling we would remove it but we did not need to sort it.
We had no packaging or animal products in the compost.
We used a pick up truck to transport the containers and we did not have a good way to load these. We often had to lift 50-90 lb trash containers up into the truck bed, and us not having the correct equipment contributed to it not being a sustainable program for us. The waste was extremely wet and so something that made it tricky to handle and and to transport. We were using leaves from U of I landscaping for the Brown material.
I did not track the cost of our transportation because we would often drop our produce off and pick up the waste on the same trip. We were driving a pickup truck about 3 miles per trip 2-3 times a week. We were picking up between 60-100 gallons of food waste per week during the semester.
Also we were using a vermi-compost unit which was not the most effective system for this, if you wanted to do a composting set up I would recommend a larger windrow set up."
see file
Ximing Cai and Morgan White met with students Sohinee Oswal and Devaki Belwalkar about their food waste reduction app "Dibbs." We discussed the possibility of connecting their efforts with iCAP objectives. They are focused primarily on grocery stores, so the best option for working together is for Dibbs to connect with Dining Services and their convenience stores (Chomps, 57 North, and Penn Station).
