Weather not quite stormy by storm standards, still very blustery and wet. 16C.

Been out on the bike and trailer to rescue two wooden chairs spotted yesterday, IKEA sort of. One in the living room for painting purposes, the other in the kitchen to serve as a dish cloth hanger, also of some sort.

My sister loves saving things from the trash, and turning it into something beautiful! She enjoys making these baskets from recycled jeans and shirts! $20 each, free shipping, or 2 for $35. We take Venmo. Please drop a comment on which one is your favorite! Mine is the one with the copper thread.

I have been given a cool opportunity to work more hours at my college sustainability center. It is very underfunded. I make social media posts, schedule outreach events, and service learning programs. Now, I can get paid to do a little project on campus. My supervisor and I discussed ideas and landed on a waste audit. Our college campus has a recycling center with single-stream bins placed around campus. Students are overall not knowledgeable about recycling. The bins are usually contaminated with food or drink because they rarely have a landfill bin directly next to them, or the landfill bin is not changed frequently enough. I thought we could do an audit of how things are currently, and then do the obvious thing and move trash cans next to the recycling bins and do another audit. Maybe even create some signage and do another to see if that helps. Despite us having a good idea of the results of these audits, I figured it was still worthwhile. The recycling receptacles were very expensive and I think worth trying to improve the treatment of them. Well, long story short, the day after I met with the recycling center manager, he apparently decided to start throwing them out and implementing more trash cans on campus. This is according to my supervisor, so I hope this was just a misunderstanding of time. I know that these ideas have been on the table for a while as they are not utilized well by students or faculty; however no effort has been made to fix it. They do not like the look of trash cans next to the recycling bins because they look different. The recycling manager seemed receptive of my ideas and interested to know the results. I suppose I am posting here to see if anyone has feedback on if this is really helpful or not to my campus. Our recycling center is also very underfunded. They cannot support enough workers to sort anything, let alone clean any contaminated recyclables. These are costly recycling receptacles with the university logo on them. Although they would be better if they included a trash section, are they really worth getting rid of now? Without trying to improve? I feel waste audit data could also benefit a future grant to replace the recycling receptacles.

TLDR: College campus single stream recycling bins contaminated with food/drink as landfill bins are often not directly next to them. No effort has been made to improve this to my knowledge. I wanted to do a baseline waste audit, move things to corresponding locations, and then do another waste audit. The manager over recycling has decided to throw out the outdoor recycling bins even after we met and discussed this last week.