Infographic Report

As we were conducting the waste audit, our group was overwhelmed by the noticeably large amount of food waste that compiled large amounts of the general trash bags. Although there is composting offered in the dining halls, it seemed that many people were eating food on the go and away from dining halls – causing the outdoor trash bins to be overwhelmingly filled with food waste. Using this as the basis for our infographic, we decided to make the damage being done by wasting so much food extremely apparent by visually comparing the amount of food we are wasting to the amount of actual post-consumer waste that must to go to the landfill. We use the recognizable image of the Colorado license plate as the main image in our inforgraphic in order to create a sense of commonality between the reader and their waste. Within and around the license plate we used concise sentences filled with shocking statistics to grab the reader’s attention and pull them in to read more.

Over half of what is thrown away on campus can be composted or recycled. This means that if we composted everything we are able to on campus, we would be sending 40% less waste to the landfill every quarter. In addition to the large amount of compostable waste going to the landfill, we have huge amounts of potentially recyclable materials also being sent straight to the landfill. With 20% of the trash per quarter being composed of recyclables, if we recycled and composted we could reduce the amount of waste we send to the landfill every quarter by 60%. These diversion rates need to be changed, but they will never be changed if the student population doesn’t know how big of a problem we are creating. The waste on campus is our waste – we make the problem, therefore we can fix it. The infographic aims to make it clear how much we could be helping to produce if we simply started to divert our trash stream. As Jonathan Bloom points out, “Anytime institutions have the chance to reduce both their expenses and environmental impacts without any upfront costs, they are probably going to jump at the chance” (243). The DU campus has already invested in the “upfront costs” with the composting options being brought into dining halls and outdoor recycling bins in the last 2 years. Now that we have already faced the problem of expenses, we need to increase the amount of use these bins are getting. With the options around campus, however limited they are, it is relatively easy to throw waste into the correct bins.  

Our infographic aims to educate the reader about the high cross contamination of the general trash bins on campus. Even though there is still a high amount of post-consumer waste being thrown in the trash bins, the amount of compostable or recyclable materials outweighs this post-consumer waste.  We hope our infographic inspires students to reverse this trend and start decreasing our footprint on campus.

Work Cited

Bloom, Jonathan. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away nearly Half of It's Food (and What We Can Do About It). Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2010. Print.

Cooper Leith, Emma Naatz, Mariah Foley