Waste not want not
08-03-2010
Old proverbs are usually a bit boring, but often a bit useful. I don’t know about you, but I seem to be facing a mountain of waste: at home, in the office, in the world.
What is waste? Wikipedia defines it as “unwanted or unusable materials”. Ray Anderson, founder of billion dollar company InterfaceFLOR defines it as unnecessary: both as a financial expense and as an irresponsible use of natural resources. InterfaceFLOR created Mission Zero which “is our promise to completely eliminate the negative impact our company may have on the environment by 2020”. Since 1996, the company has reduced waste globally by up to 76 percent and saved 405 million dollar.
At the EUR, we have lots of waste. In fact, we have tonnes of it. For instance, in 2009, the EUR community generated over 2500 tonnes of waste (2.5 million kilos), with a total budget expenditure of 55082.28 euro. The biggest contributors to waste are paper, cardboard, followed by glass. Unfortunately, waste is not measured for each faculty.
The central facility at EUR is actively trying to green our waste and signed an agreement with van Gansewinkel, a Dutch waste management company. But there is a collective nature to the problem: waste is produced by all of us, and its reduction requires the same commitment. Waste just isn’t that inspiring: when we’re finished with something – a plastic cup for coffee, a draft copy of a Master’s thesis, our leftover food from lunch, our can of Fanta, we routinely throw the waste “away”. But there is no “away”. Waste ends up some place. Even if we recycle it, it ends up some place, often not a good place (despite rumours to the contrary, Roteb in Rotterdam doesn’t take out aluminium cans from garbage before they burn it: go on the plant tour if you don’t believe me).
On campus, there are more recycling facilities. But user behaviour is inconsistent. In a random test of RSM green practices, paper recycling bins on different floors were investigated in the T-building. Was our paper waste being recycled properly? In some cases, yes. But people often recycled incorrectly – e.g., throwing in plastic thesis covers along with the paper (why do students use those plastic covers anyway?). A small mistake but the reality is that the entire bin will be thrown away as “garbage”. The biggest shock was the discovery of a microwave oven wrapped in a plastic garbage bag and thrown in with the paper recycling.
Who did that?! Maybe we need to offer a reward to help catch these “waste cowboys”. Or maybe it’s time for EUR to be bold: adopt its own Mission Zero and provide incentives for each faculty to waste not, want not.
Dr. Gail Whiteman
www.erim.eur.nl/scr
