This team is focused on how to best maintain and improve the University’s food procurement, purchasing, waste management, and recycling programs. The group will work to implement a Zero Waste movement (like that described in the iCAP), which will require a “whole system” approach to resource management that implicates purchasing, maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, reduces consumption and ensures that products are made to be reused, repaired, or recycled back into the system. This system will reduce greenhouse gases by saving energy by reducing energy consumption associated with extracting, processing, and transporting raw materials and waste, and by reducing and eventually eliminating the need for landfills and incinerators.

This group will address the University’s progress on meeting the iCAP goals in regards to purchasing, waste, and recycling. It will look to help further the progress of the iCAP’s targets of a Zero-Waste campus policy. The group will approach this by working to make campus purchasing entities responsible for costs of the disposal of the products consumed and by avoiding the purchasing of environmentally irresponsible products and corporations (based on carbon and other environmental indicators).

Goals from the iCAP that this team will look to take to improve and take to the next level are:

• Increase the rate of recycling for non-construction and demolition waste from its current rate of 50%.
• Not only improve construction and demolition waste recycling for LEED projects, but smaller ones on campus as well.

(This team was previously known as the Purchasing, Waste, and Recycling (PWR) SWATeam.)