UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – On an early morning in August, about a dozen members of Penn State’s custodial staff gathered in Eisenhower Chapel for an overview of efforts to improve waste reduction and recycling at Penn State. The project has been underway for a few years now, and included updated signage around wastebins, waste station mapping and analyzing the trash collected around campus.
For Waste Reduction and Recycling Program Manager Ayodeji Oluwalana, who led that morning’s conversation — and many more, with additional members of the custodial team — the presentations also serve as an opportunity to gather insight from those dealing firsthand with contaminated recycling and poorly sorted waste products on a regular basis.
“Custodians play a significant role when it comes to waste management on campus. Every summer, I do a ton of meetings with University custodians just to get feedback from them,” Oluwalana said. “Some of the feedback I get from them, I run with those ideas. Then, the next year, I can give them a report to show what I do with that information.”
Feedback from custodial staff this summer included the need for more student education on the importance of separating their recycling into the correct bins. Some attendees brought up ideas like incorporating recycled plastic into 3D printing filament or producing videos on best practices.
Ideas from staff members may not be immediately actionable, Oluwalana said, but brainstorming what can be done differently often leads to positive changes down the line. At the first town hall after he was hired, he said, the main feedback was that composting was highly contaminated with non-compostable items. With the help of employees, he worked to come up with a solution.
“One of the groups said it would be better to just narrow compost to food waste only. I took that feedback to a group redesigning signage for wastebins, and we implemented it,” Oluwalana said. “So far, while the custodians said that the system still is not completely perfect, people now are able define what is and what is not compostable.”