Week 2: Bringing Composting to the Masses

Cameron and I (Monika) were chatting recently about whether students at ND are aware that sustainable options for food waste management exist in the real world.

Do ND students know that composting food waste results in significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than landfilling food waste? If students learned how to compost while they were in college, would they be more likely to compost as adults in the real world? Is there some way that our senior design project could incorporate student education & participation that is "not too inconvenient for them"?

These types of questions continue to be mentioned in our team meetings, because if we believe that sustainable food waste management is important, we should also be thinking about how ND students can incorporate sustainable food waste management into their lifestyles. Yes, reducing the amount of food waste produced is an excellent first step, but having an understanding about how composting works could potentially help students be more willing to compost their food after life at ND.

Cameron was inspired by a small business in Chicago called WasteNot Compost. It operates a municipal food waste collection program and sells the compost to local buyers. To apply this idea to our project, we thought of placing food waste bins in the LaFortune Student Center and cafe's around campus, and having a student-coordinated food waste pickup program that would bring that food waste to the dining hall food waste bins, where it would be transported en masse to be composted. If a composting facility existed on campus, it could be used for research in classes, and campus visitors (esp. for football games) could get a tour of the facility to learn about how composting works! I think that the idea of having a composting facility on ND's property has remained a favorite food waste management option for us because of the educational opportunities.

We don't just want to make ND's food waste into soil; we also hope to make ND students more aware of food waste management and the benefits of composting.