Faculty and Staff

Changing the way Penn Staters think about waste and recycling

Ayodeji Oluwalana, Penn State’s waste reduction and recycling program manager, has been hard at work for the past three years finding ways to improve how Penn Staters think about waste.

Ayodeji Oluwalana, Penn State’s waste reduction and recycling program manager, has been hard at work for the past two years finding ways to improve how Penn Staters think about waste. His work ranges from redesigning signs on wastebins to meeting with students, staff and faculty to teach best practices. Credit: Patrick Mansell / Penn State. Creative Commons

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.” 

Oluwalana has been with Penn State since March 2022. His position was created as part of the recommendations from the 2018-19 Waste Stream Task Force report, which highlighted different ways to effectively manage waste on campus. As the manager of waste reduction and recycling, Oluwalana serves as a bridge between operations and policy, working with both Penn State Sustainability and the Office of the Physical Plant (OPP) to address waste at the University.  

“Using what we have seen from the operational side of things, I can meet with people and say, ‘Let's look at your processes, because something is not right. This is what we're seeing,’” Oluwalana said. “That has been a missing link in waste reduction previously.” 

The data and information gathered by OPP staff on waste patterns and issues can be used to inform the education and strategies of sustainability programs, Oluwalana said. His work involves both sides of the equation: he assists with waste management efforts like clean-ups at Beaver Stadium after game days, and he visits classes to give lectures. 

“My approach to waste management, waste reduction and recycling at Penn State is to be able to look at Penn State as a system where every element within the system is talking to each other, and all efforts are synchronized to achieve the result we want,” Oluwalana said. 

From what he’s seen and what other employees have reported, there’s a lot of confusion to address when it comes to recycling in general. Part of that is due to the recycling industry, Oluwalana said, which underwent massive changes about seven years ago when countries like China stopped accepting recycling from the United States. 

“Prior to 2017, there was no major U.S. infrastructure or emphasis on the right kind of recycling. It was just sending it away somewhere else, where they would deal with it,” Oluwalana said. “Over the years, we’d not invested as a country into the recycling infrastructure.” 

For a few years, recycling struggled across the country. Many communities who ran recycling programs stopped altogether, Oluwalana said, because the costs were prohibitively high. It took a few years for the system to recover, he said, largely through government efforts to support U.S. recycling. 

“Now, we are kind of catching up, but we still have a long, long way to go when it comes to education, because a lot of people are still confused,” Oluwalana said. 

Through frequent communication and work with the Centre County Recycling & Refuse Authority to assess contamination and industry standards, Oluwalana can help to clarify what the needs are in Centre County with regards to managing waste and recycling. 

One of the hurdles in University programs, he said, is the higher turnover for student workers. To ensure that waste management processes are maintained during those changes, Oluwalana may meet with student workers unfamiliar with Penn State’s practices and work with them to develop processes that work for them, whether that’s at University Park or the Commonwealth Campuses. 

“Many people see the recycling bin and think, ‘I can recycle anything.’ We call it wishful recycling,” Oluwalana said. “I introduce students to what we're doing when it comes to waste and how they can be involved.” 

Contamination rates — which is when items that cannot be recycled are mixed with those that can — are at the forefront of Oluwalana's mind. Oluwalana tracks contamination rates for each recycling stream and aims to reduce the overall rate by 5% annually through outreach, education, and standardization of signage and waste bins across campus buildings. 

The trick, Oluwalana said, is often just getting the messaging out in a timely manner. If changes in the recycling stream or the sorting system aren’t communicated in time, it can cause problems and additional cost to deal with the fallout. 

“When it comes to recycling, what recycling means to me might not be what recycling is to some people who have never recycled in their lives,” Oluwalana said. “Some people do what they are used to, even though they are coming from communities or different municipalities in Pennsylvania or around the world, where they put everything in one recycling bin.” 

As the University continues to update signage and communications around waste, Oluwalana said there is a clear strategy to employ straightforward, simple communication wherever possible. 

“Don't make it complicated. Very simple messaging will help people on our campus that come in from very diverse backgrounds, including folks for whom English isn't their first language or who aren't familiar with Pennsylvania's recycling code,” Oluwalana said. 

The work doesn’t stop with students, either. Oluwalana regularly meets with University employees to look for ways to improve waste reduction by changing purchasing habits within departments. Everyone in the University can play a part, he said, in changing the way Penn State handles waste. 

“My goal, going forward, is to get everybody to buy into this mantra of waste reduction. ‘If we don't need to buy it as a department, why should I order it? If I do need to order the things, can I go to Lion Surplus and explore what they have first?’” Oluwalana said. 

Oluwalana is focusing on efforts that include social media messaging, in-person outreach and an openness to ideas and initiatives from diverse perspectives across departments. His work, he said, can help to reduce both the amount of waste sent to landfills and the cost of processing that waste, by teaching others how to change their own behaviors to be more sustainable, such as purchasing pre-owned products instead of new, and properly utilizing the sorted wastebins in University buildings. 

As the University improves its efforts for waste management, Oluwalana said he has a few landmark goals he’d like to see. Over the course of a football season, he tracks the amount of waste generated during tailgating and game days, which he can use to inform future decisions around operations within the stadium. 

In 2023, the stadium and tailgate lots generated more than 100 tons of recycling and roughly four times the amount of landfill waste, he said. Major efforts have been made to improve gameday recycling, and eventually, Oluwalana hopes to see even more diversion from the landfill.  

“Waste reduction is something that touches everyone at the University. Everybody generates waste, so it's something that everyone can consider and partake in efforts to reduce,” Oluwalana said. “We can help our community, our patrons and fans to know that sustainability is our culture, this is who we are as a University.” 

While that goal is one that will require more work to achieve, Oluwalana is engaging on lower levels to make similar changes. Over time, he said, he’ll continue to meet with staff and students on the ways they can personally shift waste treatment and processing within the University.

Last Updated January 14, 2025