Waste Reduction Tips
Food Waste
- Keep a reusable mug, plate, or silverware at your desk or in your office. Use these items when purchasing drinks or food on campus
- Use a water filter and reusable bottles instead of buying bottled water
- Do not take a bag unless you need one
- Pack food that you bring from home in reusable containers
- Consider composting (visit composting page)
Packaging Waste
- Avoid buying products with excess packaging, especially plastic
- Do not buy/use polystyrene foam, since it never decomposes
- Request packaging be taken back by supplier upon delivery
- Request reduced packing by volume and weight
- Request reusable and refillable packaging
- Reuse and recycle boxes and packaging material
- When shopping, choose reusables over disposables
Office Paper Waste
- Perform a 'waste basket audit' to evaluate office recycling potential
- Purchase only the amount of supplies needed (letterhead, envelopes, business cards)
- Limit computer printouts, use electronic mail when possible to send business messages
- Review text on screen to limit mistakes on drafts
- Minimize colored, glossy, and special thickness papers since they are difficult to recycle
- Always use both sides of paper (when printing, scratch, memos, etc)
- Reuse waste paper for scrap, notes, calculations, etc.
- Scrap paper can be brought to University Printing where they cut the paper and bind into a notebook for you
Tips for a 'Green' Holiday Season
Each year, there are 2.65 billion holiday cards sold in the U.S. This is enough to fill a football stadium field 10 stories high!
- Instead of buying all new wrapping paper, try using colorful pages from magazines to wrap small items, or newspapers for larger items
- Avoid wrapping paper entirely by using reusable decorative tins, baskets or boxes
- If you do buy new wrapping paper, make sure it is from recycled paper
- Reusable cloth ribbons can be used in place of plastic bows
- Unwrap gifts carefully and save wrappings for reuse next year
- Consider gifts with an environmental message such as a tree, nature book, battery recharger or a solar powered product.
- Consider homemade gifts such as cookies, bread, jam, plants, etc
- Consider gifts that do not create waste such as concert or movie tickets, dinner at a restaurant, etc
- When going shopping, bring your own tote ags to avoid coming home with extra plastic bags
- Recycle all holiday catalogs, mailings, etc that you receive during the holiday season
If every American family wrapped just 3 presents in re-used materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.
See the following websites for additional holiday saving tips