Dal library's Green Team targets garbage
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Tina Usmiani and Sandy Dwyer hope people will look at their posters before throwing things out. (Photo credit: Mick Côté)
Posters are going up over all the garbage bins in the Killam Library. The Green Team is hoping that they will show students how to be more environmentally friendly.
The Green Team is a project that started about a year ago, where staff from certain buildings on Dalhousie's campus attempt to make their workplace more sustainable.
The team at Dalhousie University's Killam Library was the first to take on the task.
Last year, a group of students from the sustainability program audited the Killam Library's garbage bins in order to find out if people were recycling properly. Once the bags were open, the result was clear; about half of the materials found in the bins were not where they should have been.
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Rochelle Owen wants to bring Dalhousie University to its 75-per-cent waste diversion goal. (Photo credit: Mick Côté)
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"One of the things that people didn't know how to do last year was throwing out coffee cups," said Sandy Dwyer, member of the team. "We were finding coffee cups in every single bin. They'd be in the paper, they'd be in the garbage, in the recycling and in the organic bin. Nobody knew what to do with them."
Far from the big goal
Rochelle Owen from Dalhousie's sustainability team is the mastermind behind the five campus Green Teams. Her goal is make Dalhousie as green and sustainable as possible.
The university is working towards a 75 per cent diversion rate, which means that three-quarters of all waste must be kept away from landfills.
"I think it could be achievable. We'd have to do some serious changes around reducing single-use bins," said Owen. "In my view, we'd have to take them out of the classrooms, the meeting rooms and office spaces."
Her team coaches and develops groups in various buildings, floors or departments and shows them how to create a more sustainable environment.
"The Killam Library's Green Team is our first sustainability team," said Owen. "It's a great illustration of how small grassroots groups within the university can make great change and they work with students to get more data. It's a great illustration of how individuals can empower themselves, at lunch time, to actually make some real changes on campus."
Owen hopes the team can work closely with food services and other big suppliers of organic waste on campus to dispose of their scraps.
She would also like to see continued funding for sustainability programs on campus.
"Testing things out at a small level is great. We have a 110 buildings and 4.5 million square feet of campus space. Having these small pilot programs is a great way to work through the kinks," said Owen.
The Killam Library's Green Team hopes to monitor the results of their program through the help of the environmental studies department.
They will be pasting the posters one after another, starting off with the organics bin.
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