7. Stop generating waste and stop wasting it.

From a certain sort of materialist perspective, a college is just a structure and a flow of materials. We need stuff to do the educational stuff we do. But some of that stuff, frankly, is wasted-and often there's waste in producing it as well. In a finite world, we can't continue to consume materials in that root sense of the word "consume": to use up, to expend, to waste, to squander. Currently, the college doesn't have a coordinated materials policy. Consequently, this section considers some of the most prominent ways that the college procures materials and gets rid of what we term "waste." And we begin to suggest how we might be more efficient in ordering, consuming and disposing of materials.

Garbage

At a liberal arts college, we don't generally train students for manufacturing jobs, but even so, they do manufacture garbage. Every day, we fill our rooms and classrooms and offices with materials from the supermarket and the mail and the mall and the bookstore, and then, with ritual regularity, we discharge it into the waste stream. The average American manufactures between two and four pounds of garbage a day; in a year's time, for a really productive individual, that's half a ton. For 260 million Americans, that's a lot of trash.

At St. Olaf, our waste is managed by Waste Management, Inc., a national firm specializing in garbage. In our residence halls, garbage is collected by custodians during the week and by student workers on the weekend. It's transferred to one of 24 campus dumpsters, which sit outside both residence halls and academic buildings. Waste Management's trucks take the trash seven miles south on Highway 3 to the Rice County Landfill, which charges $.03/lb for disposal.

The recycling takes a similar trip. It goes from the bins located on most floors of St. Olaf buildings to containers outside each building. From there, it moves to the Rice County Recycling Center, at the same location as the landfill.

In 2003-04, Waste Management estimated that the college generated almost 130 tons of waste a month. We recycled 15 tons a month, meaning that we recovered 12 percent of our solid waste, or nearly 3 pounds per student per day (although, of course, not all of the waste and recovery is solely attributable to students).

In 2004, the college purchased a Wright In-Vessel composter, which will be installed in October on land near the James farmhouse. With a capacity of one ton per day, the composter combines food waste (including dairy products and meat) with woodchips, cardboard and other paper products, converting it to fertilizer in a period of 14 days. It may reduce garbage disposal costs. And all of the compost will be used on the college's lawns, flower beds, and athletic and agricultural fields.

But we also need to look at changes in the college's disposable culture. Most municipalities recycle far more than 12 percent of their solid waste. We still have some educational work to do.

Paper

Notebooks for sale at the St. Olaf Bookstore

It's hard to know exactly how much paper Oles use, because it comes from so many different places. We use notebook paper and computer paper, graph paper and toilet paper, Kleenex and napkins. Our books are paper, and so are the blue books we use for exams. We buy candy and other comestibles wrapped in paper, and we drink beverages served in paper cups. Generally, however, we paper over our consumption of paper.

One flow of paper on the St. Olaf campus is from Domtar paper of Canada. In 2003-04, we bought 1705 cases of copy paper, 350 boxes of printer paper, and 514 cases for "other" purposes-colored paper, 11 x 17" paper, etc. The copy and printer paper uses recycled fibers, with 30 percent post-consumer waste. All together, that's more than 10 million sheets of white 8 ½ " x 11" paper, and that doesn't begin to count paper purchased individually by students, faculty and staff.

Domtar has approved both an environmental policy and a forest management policy, and the company is listed in the Dow-Jones Sustainability Group Index. They've begun a series of environmental actions with indicators that will appear on their website. All forest lands managed by Domtar are certified ISO 14001, and some are also certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. One of the largest North American paper companies, Domtar was the first to produce Forest Stewardship Council certified papers, with virgin fiber from its FSC-certified Adirondack forest. The company also produces an earth-friendly magazine-and-catalog paper.

We also buy 7764 rolls of paper towels a year. It's 100 percent recycled paper, with 40 percent post-consumer content, If you rolled it all out, the paper trail would be 1176 miles long. We also use more than 35,000 rolls of toilet paper, which is approximately 53 million sheets of it. Laid end-to-end, these tissues would extend 3818 miles—enough to paper a path between Northfield and Honolulu.

All together, we use enough to paper over 400 acres of the earth's surface. It's a lot. We could probably use less and recycle more.

St. Olaf Paper Consumption

Computers

Computers have become essential tools for St. Olaf students, who use them for work and for play, for research and writing, for reading the news and checking the weather, for keeping in touch with family and with Oles overseas, for Instant Messenger and Google and Kazaa, for playing games and listening to music, for shopping and for surfing. There are so many of these "thinking machines" on campus that often we forget to think about them. But they have important impacts, not just on academic life, but on social and economic and environmental life as well. The people in St. Olaf's Information and Instructional Technologies have been addressing these issues for years, and they're generally following best practices in the field.

Computer lab in Holland Hall

In June of 2004, the college owned 1831 computers, and 92 percent of students also owned their own computers. The college computers are allocated to faculty and staff (1048 computers) and to the public labs (783 computers)

St. Olaf Computer Consumption

In buying computers, IIT balances factors of quality, cost, ease of deployment, and power consumption. The college almost always purchases machines that are Energy Star-compliant. And, because manufacturers are making computers more efficient, the college has been able to purchase more computers without adding much to electrical use. The current Gateway and iMac computers, for example, use electricity as follows:

Computer's Electrical Consumption

Monitors are also getting more energy-efficient. Older cathode-ray-tube (CRT) monitors used significant amounts of power, but newer liquid-crystal-display (LCD) models have reduced consumption significantly. An Apple CRT monitor, for example, uses 175 watts, while the same size LCD screen consumes just 50 watts. The college generally buys 15-inch monitors, but honors faculty requests for larger (and less energy-efficient) screens.

Printing adds to the environmental cost of our computing. The printers themselves use energy and toner and paper. Printers in public labs are always on, although they are set to power down when not in use. During the 2003-04 school year, the college's computer printers used 230 boxes (or 2300 reams or 1,150,000 pages) of paper. The bleached paper comes to the college from the Domtar paper company of Canada , and all of it is 30 percent post-consumer recycled content. To reduce the amount of paper used each year, public printers are supposed to be set for double-sided printing (although this isn't yet always the case). On the iMacs, even when a person selects the single-sided options, a program re-sets the default to double-sided within an hour.

Students are also encouraged to conserve paper. If their printing is significantly over the average, they get reminders from IIT. And if they exceed 400 pages of printing, they get charged a pro-rated fee ($30.00 for another 400 pages) for the extra printing. In 2003-04, 618 students exceeded the 400-page limit. For the 2004-05 school year, the college raised the overall limit to 550 pages.

St. Olaf used to recycle toner cartridges, but HP made this difficult by inserting a chip in its cartridges that tells the user when the toner is running low. This is a handy warning, except that it continues to show up if cartridges are re-manufactured.

In the next few years, St. Olaf's primary environmental issue with computers will be what to do with the dead ones. According to the Product Stewardship Institute, "The International Association of Electronics Recyclers projects that 1 billion computers will be scrapped worldwide by 2010, at a rate of 100 million units per year. The National Safety Council estimates that more than 60.7 million computers will become obsolete in the United States alone by 2004. Electronic wastes contain toxic substances, including lead, mercury, cadmium, lithium, brominated flame retardants, and phosphorous coatings. These toxic materials can be released upon disposal, posing a threat to human health and the environment." ¹

In the past, people have been able to bury this bad ecological design in the trash dump. But a Minnesota law that went into effect July 1, 2004 prohibits the dumping of TVs, desktop computers, laptops, computer monitors and printers in landfills. St. Olaf has generally kept computers for at least five years. If they die before their time, we have scavenged them for parts. After five years we take them to swap meets, or tried to recycle them (verb tense confusion). Now such treatment is mandatory and it will be a major concern for the college. In 2003-04, for example, the college recycled about 175 computers. In coming years—with the speedy obsolescence of computers, this will probably increase to 250 computers a year. In the short run, it will probably cost the college to recycle old computers.

¹ Product Stewardship Institute, at http://www.productstewardship.us/
prod_electronics.html .