What can be done?
1. Composting Effort and Education
The first step starts with you! Before Cal Poly can start composting again, the compost must not be heavily contaminated, meaning significantly less plastic or other items put into the wrong bin. This requires active effort, research, and thought put into every meal or disposal. Lucky for you, we put together a tool with the most up-to-date information about the correct placement of on-campus meal items.
If you have the means, spreading this information will make it even more effective. The Cal Poly community must come together to solve this issue with just a little extra effort from everyone. This is the most important thing you can do right now.
2. Cal Poly’s Changes
Once the post-consumer compost is clean enough, it’s able to be one-again combined with the pre-consumer compost from and sent to the Hitachi-Zozen Anaerobic Digester where microorganisms break down biodegradable materials to produce clean energy and compost for the community. All while diverting methane-producing waste from landfills. When the time is right, we must call for Cal Poly to take this action. But unfortunately, this is a dichotomy where either all the compost is effectively taken care of, or none of it is.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Even starting now, we can petition Cal Poly to divert resources to provide on-campus or university funded sorting to guarantee that all the waste that can be composted, does get composted.
There is a major drawback to this idea. Sorting waste is difficult and expensive. There is a reason why compost plants don’t have the economical ability to do it themselves. This solution will put a band-aid on the compost wound, but putting the active effort in to heal ourselves by properly sorting is the cheapest solution. Especially when additional money spent may eventually come from our tuition.
3. More bins for everybody
Once Cal Poly starts bringing the existing bins to compost plants, why stop there? Spread the ability to compost to second year housing, campus market, and anywhere where food scraps or other compostable waste could be disposed of. The more waste that is reused and composted, the better.
This will also require a push for these services to be provided by the university, but hardly an additional cost once the system has been established. They’ve already provided some of these services in the past, we just need to bring them back.
