What Happened to Recycling Crew?
Sierra Davis | December 2, 2021
Ruby Jane Moser
CORE Crew member, Becca White (front), with shadow, Colleen McCaig (back), loading compost buckets into the back of a truck.
Students who have been in the Warren Wilson College (WWC) sphere for a while know of the heydays of Warren Wilson sustainability — biofuel being talked about on campus, proud seminars on the waste facilities, the rumors of how the EcoDorm used to be, rarely an Eco-Cup or Gladfelter to-go box in sight and the Recycling Crew managing the waste on campus. These so-called ‘heydays’ are not a thing of the past or a mark of the ‘good times’ before COVID-19, though. Sustainability is simply shifting across the campus and shifting into the hands of the Climate, Operations and Outreach, Regeneration, and Energy (CORE) Crew.
On March 16, 2020, the then-Recycling Crew sent out an email to campus saying that their abilities with waste material were changing due to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Because of the uncertainty around the pandemic, the crew was no longer handling any trash, recycling or compost from any building on campus, and a new outsourced cleaning crew would be handling this business for the foreseeable future. With that being the main work done by the crew, along with the Free Store, changes were needed in regards to student work.
After much deliberation between the workers of the crew, the then-supervisor and various members of the institution, the school announced the transition to CORE Crew via email to students on July 29, 2021. The email further stated that Harper’s, the contracted cleaning group, would continue to manage trash and recycled materials while CORE Crew would handle the compost and change direction to focus on sustainability of the campus as a whole.
“In the long run, I would love to see CORE Crew operating as like a ‘sustainability champions’ crew,” said Brian Liechti, vice president of enrollment and marketing and director of sustainability. “Where there’s … broader outreach to campus around things like electricity use, water use, some things that are other key areas in sustainability outside of waste management.”
However, with CORE Crew not handling the waste material from buildings on campus, can students really trust that their recyclables are being recycled? According to the crew, a problem that began once the school hired Harper’s was that all the material looked the same in the clear trash bags found on campus, so many things were being combined into landfill piles.
“Over the summer and all of last year, they were collecting all of the trash and recycling and everything from campus, all of the waste, and just putting it all in a landfill dumpster,” said Audrey Mader, a junior who’s been on CORE Crew for three years. “And we were trying to work with them and figure out how to communicate to make sure recycling was happening, but it has been a rocky and difficult road with trying to get a system that works.”
Mader also went on to say that this problem has gotten better over this semester through the implementation of the ‘blue bag’ system. This system uses blue garbage bags for the recycling in buildings, allowing the Harper’s crew to distinctly see which bags belong in the recycling dumpsters and which can be thrown to the landfill. But even with this system on campus, there are still roadblocks to getting the recycling actually recycled.
“Say even a bag of perfectly sorted, clean recycling ends up in a blue bag in that (recycling) dumpster,” Mader said. “I still cannot guarantee to you that that is being recycled because those dumpsters get hauled to Curbside Management, which is a recycling sorting facility near Asheville. From there, it goes through their whole mechanical process of sorting, and just the plastic bags that end up in there are enough to contaminate it and make it so that they won’t want to put it through their machinery. … I can’t say with confidence that they are able to sort through the stuff that we have so the things that are recyclable in that dumpster do get recycled.”
And even beyond the sorting of recycled materials in Asheville, there’s also market influence that ultimately decides whether a recycled material is sent to be reused elsewhere or sent into sustainability limbo somewhere on a cargo ship in the Pacific ocean.
In the wake of this recycling conundrum, Liechti suggests that material waste may not be the hill Warren Wilson should be willing to die on, despite the long history of the recycling program on the campus and it being the first in Buncombe County back in 1981.
“I think the other question is ‘is waste the place for us to plant our flag?’,” Liechti said. “Or is there something else that we would need to complement that with or, I don’t want to lose sight of it, but are there other places where we could lean in as an institution?”
Liechti went on to say he hopes the breaking of the recycling bond will allow the crew to focus on sustainability in other areas of campus, such as composting, data collection and community education.
CORE Crew is already working on new campus projects. Cora Wingate, current student of WWC and interim CORE Crew supervisor, received a grant for the creation of a compost demonstration garden that is underway at the crew facilities. Here, community members can see different ways to turn food waste into usable compost. It features a compost tumbler, a buried trash can method, hugelkultur and a three bin composting system. They also have held open mics in their space and plan to offer sustainability workshops on topics like mending to foster community and learning centered around sustainability.
Ruby Jane Moser
Rainy Miatke, first-year on CORE Crew, moving two large, yellow trashcans at the crew facilities.
“We’ve built a lot more outreach and education work into what we’re doing than it used to be because before we were just like ‘trash people,’” said Mader.
Even so, WWC is known for their sustainability, and it is often cited as a reason students choose the school in the first place. Without the on-campus recycling program Warren Wilson used to have, some are worried that the institution might lose notoriety.
“It’s a big concern,” Liechti said. “… We made a zero waste initiative or pledge in 2017 that we would divert 90% of waste away from a landfill by 2032, with the caveat that as technology becomes available for some of those things that just aren’t able to be diverted at that point. With students no longer sorting (recycling), we’ve seen a decrease in diversion since COVID started, and then there’s the broader ecosystem of recycling and waste management that’s having an impact as well. So things like that may need to be reassessed if that’s still a feasible goal, an achievable goal.”
The school is also ranked and awarded among other institutions, namely by The Association for the Advancement for Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and The Princeton Review. AASHE uses a self-reported, holistic lens of sustainability across campus called the The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) with scorings of bronze, silver, gold and platinum. The Princeton Review scores colleges in the U.S. out of 99 and ranks schools competing for a place in the “Top 50 Green Colleges” that comes out every year.
In the previous STARS cycle, WWC earned a silver that has improved to a gold with the current cycle. From the Princeton Review, the highest ranking the college received was 17 out of 50 in 2016, but has since dipped down to the 30s. Warren Wilson’s score tends to be somewhere in the 90s, but has recently dropped to 76 for the 2020 scoring cycle.
“We have seen progress upward overall,” Liechti said. “But some of the places where we maybe have some room to improve would be like procurement of renewable energy, which is challenging in North Carolina with Duke Energy, our physical environment on campus — we have a lot of buildings, and have a lot of different systems, and we don’t have a centralized way of collecting information or data on them — things like that.”
While the school continues to navigate sustainability on campus, CORE Crew recommends that students continue to practice sustainability in their own lifestyles. Students can try to limit their use of to-go boxes and Eco-Cups in Gladfelter and Owl’s Nest, make sure no foods end up in the recycling bins, collect compost in their dorms and continue to support CORE Crew in their future sustainability initiatives for the community.
“When you acknowledge that things exist and always will, you’re more likely to interact in a respectful way,” said Mader, reflecting on her own values. “… Treating the things around you with respect and humanity is really important to the idea of sustainability.