Solid Waste Priorities (Scope 3)
2025-2030 Priorities
Background
There are several stakeholders involved in solid waste management at Western. Waste Hauling on the Main Campus is handled by the Sanitary Services Company (SSC). As of FY2024, Western has 55 separate accounts with SSC, with a variety of dumpster sizes and collection frequencies. Student Employees assist with waste operations and sustainability. FDO custodial staff provides waste management for academic buildings. University Residence Facilities provides related waste oversight for residential and dining facilities. FDO and UR Facilities are responsible for overseeing waste-hauling service with SSC for their respective facilities. SEI coordinates sustainability initiatives to improve waste diversion.
Performance
| KPIs | FY2024 | FY2030 Target |
|---|---|---|
| Total Cubic Yards of Landfill Waste | 6,549 | 5,000 |
2025-2030 Action Items
Across campus, there are several different signs and standards for how waste is collected, making it difficult for Western community members to know which waste stream to deposit materials in. This leads to contamination across waste streams and compostable/recyclable materials being sent to landfills. In the future, signage should be standardized across campus, while also recognizing that waste streams vary by building. Along with the new signage, staff (SEI, Zero Waste Western, UR, United Disposal Solutions (UDS) vendor) should continue to educate the campus community about waste diversion and proper waste sorting. Leveraging these collaborative efforts, developing and/or revising user-friendly content as needed to support Initial/Recurring Training initiatives would be ideal.
Waste tracking and GHG reporting for academic and dining waste collection points are primarily based on invoices from SSC that show dumpster size and collection frequency. University Residences' waste-tracking efforts began in Winter 2021, providing roughly four years of audit data. Since the overall campus data collection assumes dumpsters and toters are full when collected, reported waste volumes to date tend to overestimate waste generation. Western has deployed sonar dumpster monitoring technology, which improves waste tracking and reporting, resulting in cost savings by enabling Western to downsize dumpsters or dispatch waste haulers only when dumpsters are full. This capability will optimize the current processes. However, regularly conducting physical inspections at waste depots with staff is still necessary to supplement the volume data and verify capacity, contamination rates, and tidiness.
FDO coordinates waste operations. Having all solid waste management housed under FDO will enable more holistic programming and improvements to solid waste management, along with enhanced collaboration with UR and SEI. This will result in reduced waste bills, improved waste diversion, and better compliance with statewide solid waste regulations, such as the Washington Organics Management Act.
To improve waste diversion and efficiency, Western is making ongoing changes to interior and exterior waste containers and collection methods. For example, comingled containers and mixed paper have been transitioned to Single Stream Recycling, which streamlines the sorting and storage process. At the same time, cardboard has continued to be separated due to size constraints and costs. In addition, deploying more of the 4-bin style sorting stations for indoor sorting stations that don’t currently have them is another priority.