Waste Audit (Digging Through Trash)

Waste Audit Report

            Despite the efforts of the DU Sustainability Committee to keep our campus green, we as a school still do not recycle and compost to our full potential. Our largest amount of waste on campus is food. This is shown in the infographic because “Food Waste” is the largest of all the scrambled words. The problem that we found was that while food waste, which is all compostable, is the largest amount of waste produced, compost is only the second largest amount of total waste. This means that much of our food waste is going to the landfill as opposed to the compost where it belongs. This is unfortunate because of the great lengths that DU has gone to create composting on campus and it is a shame that the food that could help enrich soil and grow more crops goes to waste.

            The University of Denver is not the only place that has a food waste problem, however, so that is why this infographic could be relevant to so many other people. Half of the food produced in America goes to waste either because it goes “expired” to avoid lawsuits or simply when people don’t finish their plates. A study done by Stewart Leckie at St. Joseph’s College proved that students were uneducated on the matter of how much food waste they produced. After seeing how much of the students’ food went to waste “it was clearly obvious that we had to make students more aware about the amount of waste they were generating” (Bloom 241). Education is the first step in showing a group of people what they are doing wrong, why it is wrong, and how to fix the problem and this infographic displays those wrong doings.  

 We attempted to make it look as though the image of the dump truck was dumping all the scrambled words out of its load to further show that all those things are at some time turned into waste even if they don’t have to be. Not only does food waste stick out in our infographic but so do things like paper and biodegradable utensils which can either be recycled or composted and are often times simply just thrown away and end up in the landfill. Although food waste seems to be the biggest problem, it is not the only problem and our massive block letters help show this.

Doing this waste audit really shed light on this issue for us. It’s hard to believe or comprehend that out of everything we as students throw away (paper, bags, wrappers, cups etc.) food is the number one contributor to our waste. While going through the trash, we found an endless amount of food, some even unopened and uneaten, that was all going to waste and not even being composted. After seeing that, we could see how it was true that fifty percent of our food goes to waste. If only everybody could see what we saw and learned then we could begin to fix our problem.

           

Works Cited

American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It, Jonathon Bloom (241)

Dive, Jeremy Seifert, 2009