ATLANTA — Agnes Scott College is the first college in Georgia to compost in its residence halls. While a few Georgia colleges and universities compost in their dining halls, Agnes Scott has extended its composting to a pilot program in its residence halls and campus center, which has a snack bar and café.
The college began its composting program this fall, after successfully launching its campus-wide, single-stream recycling program, which eliminates the need to separate recyclables, the previous fall. In the past year, Agnes Scott has reduced waste being sent to landfills by about 25 percent and believes these composting measures will shrink its landfill waste even further.
“We realized that composting combined with recycling could help us to reduce our waste going to the landfill significantly. We are acting early on the waste reduction issue right now, but over time all institutions will be looking at waste reduction in order to save landfill costs and because facilities will be limited in their capacity. It’s better for Agnes Scott’s bottom line, and for the region’s health and environment, to start now,” said Susan Kidd, director of sustainability at Agnes Scott.
Residence hall composting bins are located on each floor near or in the kitchen. The bins are emptied early in the morning several times a week to reduce the potential for unpleasant odors, said Lies van Bekkum, sustainability fellow at Agnes Scott and a 2008 graduate. There are also composting bins in the college’s dining hall and the Alston Campus Center.
The campus community can deposit an array of refuse, from bones and vegetables to the compostable napkins and cups used on campus, into bins to be composted. Greenco Environmental, an organic recycling company based in Georgia, works with Agnes Scott to pick up waste materials from campus and compost them at its facility in Barnesville, Ga. After 90 days of wind, rain and mixing, the compost is sold in bulk to farmers and manufacturers.
Bags on campus are color coded to make bins easier to identify—green is compost, blue is recycling and white or black is trash that cannot be recycled or composted.
Greenco reports that so far Agnes Scott has diverted more than 24,000 pounds of food from landfills.
But as with many new initiatives, composting has presented several challenges that are still being addressed, van Bekkum said.
“We see a lot of contamination. We sometimes see students, after collecting trash in their dorm room, simply dumping it into the nearest bin they can find,” van Bekkum said.
Because the bins rest side by side, materials sometimes end up in the wrong bin. If materials that are not recyclable or compostable end up in the wrong bin, they can contaminate the bag and result in the entire bag being sent to the landfill. Even when all students on an entire floor dutifully sort their recycling, it only takes one accidental plate of spaghetti in the wrong place to ruin a bag of recycling.
When the college introduced campus-wide single-stream recycling last fall, bags were contaminated for a few months before campus got into the swing of things. By the spring, Agnes Scott was able to place 39th nationally and 2nd in the state in Recyclemania, a nationwide recycling competition among colleges and universities.
“Change takes time and it takes time to motivate the students. We’re doing lots of creative work to promote education and empower change,” van Bekkum said.
Composting is only a part of a much-wider strategy to reduce Agnes Scott’s environmental impact. The college recently completed a comprehensive, long-term Climate Action Plan, part of a commitment made with about 650 other colleges and universities all over the country to reduce their impact on the environment. Agnes Scott’s CAP outlines strategies and five-year targets designed to achieve “climate neutrality” in time for its 150th anniversary in 2039.
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Agnes Scott College educates women to think deeply, live honorably and engage the intellectual and social challenges of their times. Students are drawn to Agnes Scott by its excellent academic reputation, exceptional faculty, and metropolitan Atlanta location – offering myriad cultural and experiential learning opportunities. A diverse and growing residential community of scholars, this highly selective liberal arts and sciences college is known for its dynamic and challenging intellectual community. Encouraging students to engage the wider world through study abroad and presenting its curriculum with international context, Agnes Scott College delivers on its promise: The World for Women.