According to UW Recycling, the University of Washington’s Seattle campus currently diverts 57% of our waste from landfills to composting and recycling facilities and has a target of 70% diversion by the year 2020. In an effort to realize this goal, this project has completed three main tasks; beginning with an inventory of outdoor compost bins across the core of campus and relaying this information to the UW Garbology Project.
The project then moved indoors and surveyed members of the UW community within several buildings identified by UW Recycling as primary focus buildings. The project attempted to gain a deeper understanding of the waste behavior of the UW community. Within these same identified buildings, the project inventoried all public area waste receptacles. This information was then developed into an official memorandum including recommendations to UW Recycling, an interactive GIS map of the UW campus produced by the UW Capital Projects Office, and has helped in initiating a connection between the UW Capital Projects Office and UW Recycling. This may in fact lead to the continuation of this project, a complete map of all waste receptacles across campus, and assist in reaching a campus waste diversion rate of 70%.