With everything going on at the start of a new academic year, it’s easy to forget some of the sustainable initiatives going on each and every day at St. Edward’s. One of those initiatives that you can take part in yourself is composting. The folks over at the Wild Basin Creative Research Center, our catering team at Bon Appétit, and our Grounds, Maintenance, and Facilities departments have joined forces to bring composting to campus.
Keep your eyes out for the green bags placed in each of the restroom trash bins on campus. Those green bags indicate the fact that the paper hand towels you toss in there are composted! You can put small bits of food waste, such as a banana peel, or old flowers from campus events in there as well. The Maintenance team will remove the bags and ensure that they are properly composted instead of being thrown in a garbage can.
The Grounds department takes lawn trimmings from the property on I-35 and composts them, which keeps that cut grass out of landfills and puts them to good use.
Beginning in January of 2013, Bon Appétit teamed up with Break It Down to introduce composting bins on campus in Hunt Hall, The Huddle, and South Congress Market. The bins are clearly marked to describe what can and cannot be thrown into them. Besides food waste, you can put discarded to-go containers and paper napkins in them. These bins are collected twice a week by Break It Down.
The Wild Basin Creative Research Center has composting toilets in the main buildings on site. These toilets are low-maintenance organic waste treatment systems that use biological decomposition to convert toilet waste into a small amount of safe, stabilized end-product. They use no water, whereas a normal toilet uses about 2,920 gallons per person per year. More information on these toilets and the other ways in which the Wild Basin is staying sustainable can be found on their website.