Changing the Way the UST Community Thinks about Waste
Overview and purpose of the project:
The purpose of this project is to continue to change the way the UST community thinks about waste. Composting confronts the idea that, when you throw something away it just disappears, and provides alternative to sending our waste to landfills. In the fall of 2012, the CSF funded a project to expand Dr. Chester Wilson’s vermiculture composting system, which composts all of the coffee grounds produced by Beakers on the second floor of OWS. The goal of this previous CSF project was to expand the efforts of Dr. Wilson by collecting and composting much of the coffee grounds produced on north campus, as well as to raise campus awareness on the benefits and ease of composting. This project is well underway, and one can see the worms working their digestive wonders in the parking ramp under ASC. Quinn Wrenholt, the primary applicant of the fall vermicomposting CSF proposal, and other members of the Composting Club have been collecting the coffee grounds from the library Coffee Bene, as well as from T’s, the Loft, and Summit Marketplace in the student center since this spring semester began (with average daily collection of between 12 and 18 gallons of coffee grounds – more than 50 gallons each week). The collection crew, which consists of seven motivated individuals, comprises the core group of the Composting Club and has already logged more than 30 cumulative hours of volunteer time providing a direct service to our campus through collecting the coffee grounds we produce.
Further Composting Club activities have included another 60 hours of volunteer time contributed to the development of a long-term research project connecting the worm composting bins in the ASC parking ramp to the research occurring in the UST Stewardship Garden located in the Green Space behind the BEC. These activities, in particular the daily collection of the mass amounts of coffee grounds has drawn the attention of Tommie Media on numerous occasions
The purpose of this project is to continue to change the way the UST community thinks about waste. Composting confronts the idea that, when you throw something away it just disappears, and provides alternative to sending our waste to landfills. In the fall of 2012, the CSF funded a project to expand Dr. Chester Wilson’s vermiculture composting system, which composts all of the coffee grounds produced by Beakers on the second floor of OWS. The goal of this previous CSF project was to expand the efforts of Dr. Wilson by collecting and composting much of the coffee grounds produced on north campus, as well as to raise campus awareness on the benefits and ease of composting. This project is well underway, and one can see the worms working their digestive wonders in the parking ramp under ASC. Quinn Wrenholt, the primary applicant of the fall vermicomposting CSF proposal, and other members of the Composting Club have been collecting the coffee grounds from the library Coffee Bene, as well as from T’s, the Loft, and Summit Marketplace in the student center since this spring semester began (with average daily collection of between 12 and 18 gallons of coffee grounds – more than 50 gallons each week). The collection crew, which consists of seven motivated individuals, comprises the core group of the Composting Club and has already logged more than 30 cumulative hours of volunteer time providing a direct service to our campus through collecting the coffee grounds we produce.
Further Composting Club activities have included another 60 hours of volunteer time contributed to the development of a long-term research project connecting the worm composting bins in the ASC parking ramp to the research occurring in the UST Stewardship Garden located in the Green Space behind the BEC. These activities, in particular the daily collection of the mass amounts of coffee grounds has drawn the attention of Tommie Media on numerous occasions