David Saveanu
Reporter
Parkland is currently working on many sustainability projects and is waiting on funding for a future waste audit.
Seth Rients, Parkland’s Green Revolving Fund Coordinator, has put in a grant request to begin a campus waste audit. A waste audit is a formal process of looking into the college’s waste in an effort to ensure recycling is utilized. The plan is to begin with a preliminary audit, then move on to a campus wide audit.
“I put in an IDEAS grant request to do two different dumpsters,” Rients said.
The dumpsters Rients wants to audit are the dumpster near the U-wing and the one near the X-wing.
“That’s where I walk in everyday, so I see it and I see the amount of cardboard that’s in there. I’ve been taking pictures every day since I’ve started just to get an idea of what’s in there,” Rients said.
The preliminary audit will show the campus if it is necessary to do a campus wide audit. Whether or not the grant proposal will be approved will be known before finals this semester.
“If we get approved for funding, it’s May 1,” Rients said.
This late in the semester date means there would not be a lot of time for the audit or students willing to participate in the audit this semester.
“Worst comes to worst we can always use [the grant] next semester too,” Rients said.
Rients hopes to sort through and analyze the trash from the two dumpsters over the course of two weeks.
“If you’re looking at what’s in your waste, you’re not going to necessarily know what’s in there,” Rients said.
Visually looking at the waste accumulated in Parkland’s dumpsters isn’t enough according to Rients. He believes categorizing, weighing, and analyzing the waste is necessary to understand the type of waste present and how it can be minimized.
“I worked at the University of Illinois and in our lab, one of the things we found was [that] 10 percent of [the] weight [of the surveyed waste] was gloves. We never would’ve guessed that that many gloves were thrown away, that it weighed 10 percent of our two-week trash in a lab with 50 people,” Rients said.
This discovery is one of the things that began Rients’ interest in trying to eliminate waste by surveying it and finding out where it is coming from.
“There’s a huge Zero Waste movement that’s going in the world,” Rients said. “The whole idea…is that there’s no such thing as ‘away.’ When you throw something away it has to go somewhere.”
Rients explained that oftentimes waste isn’t thought of when thinking of sustainability. People focus on recycling, but not on reducing and reusing according to Rients.
“The whole ZeroWaste movement is taking and looking at the life cycle of a product from the beginning to try and get rid of the waste before its created,” Rients said.
The ultimate goal is that “output should be something else’s input,” Rients said.
This is a direction that Parkland is slowly moving towards.
“The idea is [to] find energy, waste, and water savings, on campus,” Rients said.
This is what Rients’s job involves, finding places where the school can improve, and ultimately, save money.
“We do projects to get those savings, and then those savings are […] put back into a revolving fund to invest into more savings,” Rients said. “The quicker the turn around, the better the savings, the better it is for the fund and the college.”
Some of the recent projects Parkland has worked on include replacing the ceiling lights in hallways in the older buildings with LED lighting, putting occupancy sensors in the janitorial closets, and faucet aerators on faucets around the college.
“We’re making good progress so far. The solar farm is going to help a lot,” Rients said. “The more of these projects that we do, the better that solar farm is going to be, because if you lower your usage, then generation is a bigger percentage of that usage.”
Rients and Parkland are hoping to provide students with the opportunity to write proposals for funding for sustainable projects.
“I believe, in the fall, were going to be opening up the fund for student ideas for the projects instead of IDEAS,” Rients said.
IDEAS is a program offered to students for ideas to “Inspire, Develop, Engage, Assess, and Sustain,” as stated on the Parkland website.
“Anybody who has ideas, if it can save money – let’s do it,” Rients said.
For more information on Parkland’s waste audit and other sustainability projects, contact Rients at srients@parkland.edu. For more information on Zero Waste efforts, visit zwia.org and true.gbci.org.
