When Alan Wang ’24 studied abroad in Kyoto, Japan, as a junior, he relished the seamless transportation options — bicycle, bus, train — that delivered him to classes at Doshisha University. 

But when Wang worked for the Maine Secretary of State’s Office last summer, he had to drive from Lewiston to Augusta, and it was a different experience. “Exhausting,” he said.

The following semester, Wang read Better Buses, Better Cities. “One of the takeaways is people don’t use buses because buses don’t make themselves known to people,” said Wang. “A lot of students don’t even know the bus stop at �ֲ���ý exists. Building a bus shelter is the best way to remind them.”

Those experiences sparked an interest in public transportation advocacy, so he went to work, doing research and turning to the college’s Green Innovation Grant program, which awards funds to �ֲ���ý community members for projects that make �ֲ���ý and the community more environmentally sustainable.

In the spring, Wang received a $2,000 Green Grant — one of four grants totalling $8,000 dispersed from the program this year — to help fund the construction of a more prominent and welcoming bus stop for the new Portland–Lewiston commuter bus line . The project was one of four Green Grant projects funded this year.

The enclosed bus stop will be built near Gomes Chapel by the Maine Department of Transportation in conjunction with the Lewiston-Auburn Transit Committee. While the $2,000 grant will pay for a fraction of the final cost — around $40,000 to $50,000 — of the new �ֲ���ý bus stop, the private funding from the college also will help secure other matching state or federal transportation funds.  

Wang has met with community leaders in Lewiston and Auburn in his effort to bring an attractive public bus stop to campus, one of several new enclosed bus shelters in the two cities. 

”His advocacy for transit is strong,” said Larry Allen, the Lewiston-Auburn Transit Committee director. “Alan espoused the benefits of consolidating transit activities between the two lines at one location on campus. This eliminates confusion and allows for the bundling of resources, such as infrastructure and capital resources.”

With a �ֲ���ý politics degree now in hand, Wang, who is from Jiaozuo, China, will test his new interest in urban planning this summer in the Lincoln (Maine) County Regional Planning Department as a transportation planning assistant. “This internship will give me a great lens on if I actually want to pursue this as my career,” he said.

A second funded proposal from Gianluca Yornet de Rosas ’24 of Mendoza, Argentina, who used his Green Grant to team up with Facility Services to add the first bird-safe window treatment at �ֲ���ý. The idea came after he witnessed bird fatalities from strikes on the windows of his residence. 

Yornet, who hopes to go into environmental conservation work, grew up in the South American region around the Andes Mountains, where he was fascinated by the Andean Condor, the largest raptor in the world. The environmental studies major also knew that bird strikes on windows are a leading cause of avian mortality — resulting in up to an estimated 1 billion bird fatalities annually, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Because of the reflective and mirror qualities of window panes, birds often can’t detect the glass barrier. Yornet’s $2,000 grant funded the purchase and installation of several adhesive bird-safe window treatments that use tiny patterns to alert birds to the window.

He hopes it’s a good start. “Maybe if it stops the birds from colliding with the windows and dying, other students might continue the project, or this will be adopted into other buildings. I wanted to make sure it got done, even if it doesn’t solve the whole issue.”

Another Green Grant grant will fund the installation of signage aimed at lessening contamination in recycling in residences. The idea was the brainchild of Caroline Mayer ’26 of Wolfeboro, N.H., and Sarah Smith ’26 of Severna Park, Md., two EcoReps who worked the past year on improving recycling habits around campus.

The signage will be placed right where students live: their rooms. “We have good signage in all of the trash and recycling rooms, but the sorting is happening in the dorm room, not once you’re down in the trash room,” said Tom Twist, assistant director of sustainability at �ֲ���ý. “By then, it’s already done.”

The signs, affixed to the back doors of rooms, spell out the recyclable material — cardboard, plastic, paper containers, glass, and metal — and that all other items should go to the landfill. “When in doubt, throw it out,” say the signs designed by Smith and Mayer, who plan to target first-year residences to instill good recycling practices at the start of their time at �ֲ���ý.

Liza Bell ’26 of Putney, Vt., won a GIG to resupply tools for the �ֲ���ý bike shop, a much needed purchase after a theft last summer depleted the supply.

The grant helped fund 30 new tools as well as a new lock system for the nine loaner bikes available to students. In addition, Bell said the grant helped keep those loaners in the Ladd Library gear library in good working order. As a result, usage increased this spring, with all nine bikes checked out much of the time.

“This project will contribute to the school’s green bike share program which makes biking on campus more accessible. By having the necessary tools and locks we will be able to continue to expand and improve the program,” Bell explained in her proposal.

This story was updated on November 3, 2025 to reflect more recent information on the number of birds killed each year from window strikes.

“I ultimately want to go into sustainable business, working on supply-chain logistics and making them greener,” says Tamsin Stringer ’22 of Bloomington, Ind.

�ֲ���ý’ Green Innovation Grant program, Stringer adds, has given her a real-world reminder of what it will take to succeed in that work.

A member of the EcoReps, �ֲ���ý’ student sustainability corps, Stringer has been involved with a multiyear effort to replace restroom paper towels at �ֲ���ý with electric hand dryers. In applying for Green Innovation Grants to support that campaign, the EcoReps have taken pains to quantify the downsides of paper towels — their cost, the amount of waste they generate, and the staff hours that go into refilling dispensers and emptying waste receptacles.

Working with those numbers “has really given me a sense of the work that you have to do, to get that evidence and to do that research, in order to change structures that are supposedly unchangeable,” Stringer says.

The Green Innovation Grants, aka GIGs, are relatively small sums awarded to �ֲ���ý students, staff, and faculty for projects that make �ֲ���ý more environmentally sustainable — often in surprising ways.

For its fourth year, the program funded seven projects, ranging from $150 for helping birds avoid window collisions to the total of $3,600 for two proposals for supplanting paper towels with electric dryers.

The GIG program was designed to encourage �ֲ���ý folks, especially students, to become active stakeholders in advancing sustainability at the college. “The opportunity to have some ownership of how the college runs, even in small ways, can give students the power to feel like they can address larger issues,” says Emma Wheeler ’20 of Bergen, Norway, who with Stringer proposed one of the hand dryer projects.

“At �ֲ���ý, just because it’s such a close-knit, smaller community, this kind of funding — while it may seem small compared to other schools — and these projects have a much larger impact campus-wide,” says Stringer. “We feel the impact of every single project.”

Tom Twist, �ֲ���ý’ sustainability manager, points out a few themes that this round’s successful projects, all of which were proposed by students, have in common. One is attempting to mitigate the campus waste stream. In particular, as they have in past years, students are showing a strong interest in finding ways to recycle problematic items.

One of the most eye-opening ideas came from Henri Emmet ’21 of New York City. He received a $240 grant to establish a means of recycling a notoriously hard-to-recycle waste material, plastic foam such as Styrofoam. Emmet’s solution: raising larvae of the beetle species Zophobas morio, which not only eat foam but are nourished by it and reduce it to harmless organic matter.

An environmental studies major and member of �ֲ���ý’ track and cross country teams, Carly Harris ’22 of Orinda, Calif., proposed a collection box for worn-out athletic shoes in Merrill Gym. Once filled, the box will go to a company that deals with tough-to-recycle products. Previous GIGs have paid companies such as TerraCycle, of Trenton, N.J., to recycle nitrile gloves and wrappers from snack foods such as chips and energy bars.

Shoes, Twist explains, tend to be what recycling experts call “monstrous hybrids” — they combine different types of material in a way that makes recycling them difficult and expensive. Harris’ program, he says, “is nice because it funds the dissection of your typical shoe so that it can be recycled.”

Harris finds that she goes through about four pairs of athletic shoes annually. And according to her GIG proposal, �ֲ���ý’ 850 or so student athletes each year use up at least 1,000 pairs of athletic shoes, which have historically ended up in the landfill.

This year’s grants also demonstrate that “students are really getting more involved in the infrastructure of campus,” says Twist. He adds, “That’s what we had hoped would happen” with the program. “It shows a sophistication on their part to start to look at the built environment and how to change it.”

For instance, four students proposed the installation of bathroom light controls in the three dorms of the Residential Village. Apparently designed to be lit 24/7 when the dorms were built, in the early 1990s, the bathrooms were never equipped with on-off switches.

Meanwhile, Mia Shifrin ’23 of Weld, Maine, and Amelia Keleher ’21 of Corrales, N.M., members of the EcoReps’ campus garden group, received some $1,500 for facilities at the college’s vegetable garden that will make the space more useful for informal and formal education. This will help realize an early goal for the garden, aka The Plot.

Taking on the campus wastestream and infrastructure too, the Stringer-Wheeler project is part of a greater EcoRep plan to convert a total of 38 towel dispensers in five buildings — the Page, Adams, Parker, and Rand residences, as well as Chase — to dryers.

Paper hand towels account for more than a third of the waste from residential buildings with paper towel dispensers, Stringer and Wheeler wrote in their proposal (which will pay for the installation of two already-purchased dryers in the restrooms that serve the Bobcat Den. The other project is for four dryers in Rand Hall.) And the towels can’t be composted and must be sent to the local landfill.

Moreover, the pair stated, for just the five buildings in the EcoRep study, the college spends upward of $21,000 annually on paper towel-related expenses.

The first-year cost of the conversion for the five buildings would be close to $78,000 — but the annual operating cost of the dryers would be $600. After five years, they predicted, �ֲ���ý would save about $105,000, and after 10 years, about $210,000.

In addition to the savings both in dollars and waste, the dryers make life easier for the custodians and for the crews who pick up trash from the buildings. The students “took everything into account, really — the cost of buying paper towels, cost of disposing of them, the labor involved in having to manage all the paper towels, etc.,” says Twist. “It was really nicely done.”

In fact, Twist points out, the EcoReps’ fact-finding in the case of towels vs. dryers has come to the attention of the college’s capital planners, “to see if we could do that on a wider scale, because it has such a favorable payback.” He adds, “It’s pretty staggering. And no one really knew before the students did some work on it.”

As the GIG program has progressed from year to year, “we’ve seen a lot of increasingly practical projects that are very well-documented and thought-through,” Twist says. “And that also shows an increasing sophistication beyond just, ‘Wouldn’t this idea be nice?’

“The students are doing a really good job in making a hard case for these things to happen.”

Green Innovation Grants awarded for 2019–20

Proposal (two combined): Replace paper towels with hand dryers in Chase and Rand halls
Submitters: Tamsin Stringer ’22, Bloomington, Ind.; Emma Wheeler ’20, Bergen, Norway; Dianna Georges ’22, Clifton, N.J.; Noah Pott ’22, Great Barrington, Mass.
Award: $3,600
Goal: Reduce cost of, waste produced by hand-drying at �ֲ���ý

Proposal: Place stickers on 280 College Street glass walls to increase their visibility to birds
Submitter: Adam Banks ’21, Jamaica Plain, Mass.
Award: $150
Goal: Reduce bird casualties from flying into glass

Proposal: Breed insect larvae (Zophobas morio) that consume and digest plastic foams such as Styrofoam
Submitter: Henri Emmet ’21, New York City
Award: $240
Goal: Reduce plastic waste produced by the college

Proposal: Place a collection box in the Merrill Gym lobby to collect discarded athletic footwear for recycling
Submitter: Carly Harris ’22, Orinda, Calif.
Award: $274
Goal: Reduce the amount of worn-out athletic footwear produced by students and sent to the landfill

Proposal: Furnish Ladd Library with “stapleless” staplers
Submitter: Hermione Zhou ’21, Shenzhen, China
Award: $300
Goal: Reduce one-use consumption of metal staples, make paper more recyclable

Proposal: Standardize waste collection facilities among �ֲ���ý dorms
Submitter: Olivia LaMarche ’20, Lynnfield, Mass.
Award: $767
Goal: Increase amount of waste accepted for recycling by reducing contamination

Proposal: Create facilities for informal and formal education in the �ֲ���ý Plot
Submitters: Mia Shifrin ’22, Weld, Maine; Amelia Keleher ’21, Corrales, N.M.
Award: $1,512
Goal: Enhance the �ֲ���ý Plot’s role as a gathering space, and improve organization and accessibility to the garden for �ֲ���ý and Lewiston communities

Proposal: Install bathroom lighting controls in the Residential Village
Submitters: Julia Panepinto ’20, Buffalo, N.Y.; Olivia McCulloch ’21, Sunderland, Mass.; Ruby Lightbourn ’21, Los Angeles; Jared Schell ’21, Media, Pa.
Award: $1,800
Goal: Conserve energy by turning off lights when bathrooms are empty

Just past 8 last Thursday morning, a crew from �ֲ���ý Facility Services drove their red Chevy pickup truck to a nearby recycling center.

They weren’t making a delivery to Casella Waste Systems — the utility trailer they were hauling was empty.

Instead, the trip was for art’s sake, as the �ֲ���ý team of Mike Adams, Rick Ouellette, Mike Lecompte, and Eric Polley transported five bales of sorted plastics from Casella back to �ֲ���ý, where the bales are now a temporary artistic installation on the lawn outside Commons.

At the Casella facility that morning, as the five bales waited for a forklift to place them onto the �ֲ���ý trailer, they weren’t yet art. Or were they?

A forklift loads one of five bales of plastics recyclables, all destined for the �ֲ���ý campus, onto a flatbed utility trailer at the Casella facility in Lewiston on Oct. 25. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

“One of the folks moving the bales asked me, ‘Is it art yet?’” said who’s behind the exhibit Out of Sorts, now on view on the lawn outside Commons. “It’s an interesting question.”

Herman’s installation is best appreciated in context, including why it’s here: as part of a bold new �ֲ���ý Museum of Art exhibition, Anthropocenic: Art About the Natural World in the Human Era, which opened last week, featuring artwork examining humanity’s mark on the planet with pathos, wit, and an eye-opening diversity of conceptual approaches and media.

Herman, who has shown her art at the Portland Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other venues, is a �ֲ���ý visiting artist. Supported by the Learning Associates program, she is joining classes and meeting student groups.

+What's in the Five Bales?

This bale of plastics contains colored high-density polyethylene (HDPE), such as bottles of detergent and liquid drain openers. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

On loan from Casella Waste Systems, the bales that comprise the installation Out of Sorts contain five types of commonly recycled plastics, . Casella also bales up paper, metal, and glass.

Bale 1: Uncolored high-density polyethylene (HDPE) — e.g., milk, cider, water gallon jugs; large vinegar jugs. These have a plastic identification code 2.

Bale 2: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) — e.g., water bottles, peanut butter jars, ketchup bottles, power drinks. These have a plastic identification code 1.

Bale 3: Colored HDPE 2— e.g., laundry detergent, bleach, motor oil, and antifreeze containers. These have a plastic identification code 2.

Bale 4: Mixed HDPE plastics — tubs and lids, butter containers, McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts clear plastic iced-coffee cups. These have a plastic identification codes 2 through 5.

Bale 5: Rigid plastics — e.g., larger items such as laundry baskets and utility buckets. These have mixed plastic identification codes up to 7.

Last year, Herman installed a version of Out of Sorts at SPEEDwell Projects in Portland, where it ” critic Daniel Kany said in a Portland Press Herald review.

It’s offering that appearance at �ֲ���ý, too: The five bales sit in an otherwise pretty �ֲ���ý place, pieces of plastic from the bales flapping and flying away in the October breeze.

And as the bales did in Portland, they present at �ֲ���ý “a practically inexplicable oddness,” in Kany’s words.

Perhaps odd because the bales embody a paradox. They’re about “doing the right thing by our world” by recycling, Herman says, yet so many items inside the bales, like plastic water bottles, suggest that “we’ve hooked our wagon to the paradigm of convenience.”

Mike Adams of �ֲ���ý Facility Services uses a forklift to nudge one of the five bales that comprise the installation Out of Sorts into position outside Commons on Oct. 25. Artist Adriane Herman (left) and Dan Mills, director of the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art, guide the placement. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

As an oddity, “it’s definitely art,” says Jake Michael ’21, a prospective English major from Ketchum, Idaho, who stopped by the bales on Tuesday. His reasoning: “It’s a representation of something designed for a specific purpose. In a way, it’s aesthetically appealing, the way they’re lined up.”

Herman says the quip “Is it art yet?” was made in fun but is still worth addressing. For one, the bales, measuring 5 feet by 4 feet by 3 feet, weren’t even created by an artist (though in terms of what defines art, that’s not a dealbreaker, considering ). And, she says, “I’m not necessarily invested in them being called art.”

“My intention is to pluck these things from ‘the unseen’ and to boomerang them back.”

Instead, she explains, her creative act is in “borrowing them and recontextualizing them.” That is, removing them from a recycling facility tucked away in an industrial park and plopping them down in a highly public space at a liberal arts campus.

“Context and intention are very important,” she says. “My intention is to pluck these things from ‘the unseen’ and to boomerang them back. It’s like finding gum on your shoe, which this stuff really is.”

Maine artist Adriane Herman inspects the bales of plastic recyclables before they were placed into position on the lawn outside Commons. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

And some of that gum could be our own. Since Casella handles �ֲ���ý recyclables, “some of what’s in the Bales may be making a return trip to campus,” says Dan Mills, director of the Museum of Art.

After seeing a few photos of the Nahida Moradi ’22 of New York City says that context matters in another way: distance.

“It stood out to me: the photo of guy with a skateboard, really up close, looked cool.” From another perspective, the top floor of Roger Williams Hall, “it just looked like blocks of plastics gathered together. It didn’t seem that cool, from far away.”

The blocks also make her think, in a hopeful way, of the building in Taiwan that was . “It’s a good way of putting to use what’s been wasted.”

A skateboarder flies past the bales of plastics before they were placed into position. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The bales have thus become objects of contemplation by an audience, Herman says. “So I think they fulfill that role of art — to make people think about things, and to activate people around what they’re consuming and disposing.”

As Jake Michael got closer to the bales and saw the twisted and contorted items smashed inside, he also thought about context. “I’m thinking about how I view these things differently when they’re not bundled together in a heap of trash — and it makes me think they’re kind of disgusting now.

“Yet we created them and we don’t think ‘disgusting’ when they’re not bundled together, when we don’t see this product. In that respect, I would say that it is art, yes.”

Seen from the top floor of Roger Williams Hall, the bales are placed onto the lawn in front of Commons. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College).

As Austin Dumont ’21, an aspiring politics major from Auburn, Maine, considered the bales, he thought about privilege: Who gets to recycle? Who gets to have the knowledge about recycling?

“Because of the disparities in knowledge about these things, some communities may have recycling, and some may not,” he said. “It might depend on where you live, your ZIP code — and some of that might have to do with income.”

At �ֲ���ý, earnest efforts by the college’s sustainability team, including Dining Services, has increased the percentage of waste diverted from landfills to 45 percent.

Improving the diversion rate can pay dividends: �ֲ���ý pays between $60 and $80 per ton for trash that goes to a landfill, and typically about half that for out-going recyclables, though the has meant that �ֲ���ý has paid as low as $7 per ton and as high as $107 per ton in the last year.

The Casella facility in Lewiston takes in recyclables — cardboard, paper, plastic, metal, and glass — from �ֲ���ý as well as cities and towns around Maine and New Hampshire, processing up to 22 tons of material each hour and selling the baled results to manufacturers to create new products.

(More context: The route to the facility from campus takes you past Casella’s neighbor: a massive Walmart distribution center, one of only two in New England. You can’t help but think: Stuff heads out one door at Walmart and, eventually, in the other door at Casella.)

A Casella worker sweeps the floor next to a stack of baled recycled paper. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

At Casella, the sorting requires brute force and a light touch, a mix of people and machines. “It’s sorted by and it’s baled by us,” says Mary Haynes, a Casella supervisor.

After Casella trucks dump unsorted materials into big rooms, known as tipping floors, large front-end loaders and smaller skid-steer loaders move the waste toward conveyor belts.

At the beginning of the sorting process, workers hand-remove nonrecyclables, like Styrofoam, as the materials speed by on the conveyor belt. From there, much finer sorting processes, both mechanical and human, eventually yield a balable stream of recyclable materials.

Look at the bales, says Herman: All that industry is inside. “They’re monumental and massive. Look at the heft of them, the weight — it takes machinery and people and trucks and more fossil fuel to move them.”

Artist Adriane Herman and Mike Adams of �ֲ���ý Facility Services confer at the Casella Waste Systems recycling facility on Oct. 25. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

Yet while the bales suggest big ideas like consumerism and recycling, Herman asks that we notice, too, how they’re loaded with poignant, if mundane, evidence of “our daily activities and efforts — to feed ourselves, our families, and our pets; to clean and organize things; and to stay alive and mentally stable,” the latter a reference to prescription-medicine bottles here and there in the bales.

All of it, she says, is worth our attention and focus. “We can always look more closely at what we are doing,” she says.

And when we “attend to things at the granular level,” she says, we stake a claim for being “more sensitive to subtlety and nuance” — a lesson of the liberal arts, to be sure — at time when such qualities are in short supply.

In a national recycling competition among 167 U.S. colleges, �ֲ���ý earned top-30 rankings for successfully minimizing waste and diverting waste from landfills.

, held during February and March, encourages colleges and universities to reduce and reuse their waste.

�ֲ���ý placed 12th out of 169 schools nationally for Food Organics, a measure of how much food waste is donated, composted, or otherwise diverted; and 28th out of 171 schools for Diversion, which measures the total waste diverted away from landfills or incineration.

The college’s EcoReps, students who lead sustainability-related projects on campus, spearheaded �ֲ���ý’ participation in the competition. But they’re not resting on their RecycleMania laurels.

“The results show us what areas we need to work on and more of what we need to do in the future,” says Olivia LaMarche ’20, who is in an EcoRep group focused on waste and recycling. “It’s a really good benchmark.”  

RecycleMania encourages recycling across several categories. Three hundred colleges and universities across the United States and Canada, with a total enrollment of 3.6 million, or composted 68.6 million pounds of waste during the Feb. 4–March 31 competition.

�ֲ���ý and the EcoReps have made concerted efforts in recent years to reduce waste on campus, including installing standardized bins for sorting waste, eliminating paper coffee cups in Commons, and hosting “No Waste November” events around the ever-popular annual Trashion Show.

Sustainability Manager Tom Twist and several EcoReps show off the college’s color-coded waste receptacles, installed in 2017. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

�ֲ���ý’ strong RecycleMania numbers show that the college is doing well in an area that often proves a tough nut to crack: changing people’s behavior. 

“We’ve been putting a lot of thought into waste reduction, such as standardization of bins, and these numbers would suggest that it’s working,” says Sustainability Manager Tom Twist.

Using receipts from the local companies that take �ֲ���ý’ waste to area landfills, recycling centers, or composters, the EcoReps were able to measure how many pounds of waste the campus produces and where the waste goes.

But to reduce those numbers as much as possible, the EcoReps had to get other students informed and on board. So they took to Commons in February and March, explaining RecycleMania and asking waste-related trivia questions. Such as:

• Question: How many pounds of food does Commons send to a local pig farmer each week? Answer: 3,900.
  
• Question: Approximately what percentage of waste does �ֲ���ý Dining divert from the landfill? Answer: 80 percent.

The EcoReps also devised a waste-reduction competition among �ֲ���ý residences, with a bagel breakfast as a grand prize. To get dorm-specific waste information, the EcoReps teamed up with an environmental science class to conduct waste audits, sifting through trash and recycling bins to figure out what students throw out and whether they throw it in the right place. (The winners of that competition are yet to be announced).

During the 2017 Trashion Show, Domi Frideger ’21 models an outfit designed by Sarah Sachs ’18 and Olivia LaMarche ’20. The outfit was meant to highlight that food and liquids don’t go with other recyclables. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“It’s a great eye-opener for the students to see what was in there, in some cases seeing if it’s being sorted poorly or not,” Twist says.

The success of the RecycleMania effort, as with every sustainability initiative at �ֲ���ý, was due to collaboration across campus. Dining Services has long worked to divert food waste, and the college’s Facility Services staff helped the EcoReps to make accurate waste audits possible. 

“They adjusted their whole schedule and were able to set aside the waste and recycling for us for that day, which is a pretty big disruption,” Twist said. “We’re grateful that they did that.”  

A new garden providing fresh produce to Dining Services.

Further reductions in the amount of food scraps and other waste, including an eye-popping amount of paper towels, that �ֲ���ý sends to the landfill.

More efficient water usage in Merrill Gym — and easier access to drinking water in Carnegie Science Hall.

Proposed by students, staff, and faculty, these are some of the sustainability projects that �ֲ���ý’ Green Innovation Grant program is supporting this year. Eight awards, some as large as $2,000, were approved late last semester to fund the campus initiatives.

“We want to reward folks for being innovative and impactful. Those are the criteria that we’re most looking for,” says Tom Twist, GIG administrator and the college’s sustainability manager.

Vetted by the steering committee of �ֲ���ý’ Committee on Environmental Responsibility, the grants not only boost green practices on campus, but, as Twist says, “help students in particular, but also staff and faculty, feel ownership of sustainability on campus.”

Jake O’Hara ’21 of Milford, Conn., is one of a team of students who received a Green Innovation Grant to recycle gloves used in science labs. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Now in its second year, the GIG program came barreling out of the gate in 2016–17 with proposals that included a reusable mug program that has eliminated the 750,000 disposable paper cups that used to pass through Commons every year.

Among the current crop of GIG projects, the proposal from Nell Houde ’18 of Meriden, N.H., for a new vegetable garden may be the most uplifting. Houde, who is partnering with Dining Services, received a $1,885 GIG that will pay for tools, seeds, and other startup supplies. (Dining Services has run an herb garden adjacent to Commons for some years.)

Occupying about a quarter-acre of a plot near campus, the garden will present “a sustainable model of food production,” albeit on a small scale, says Houde. In addition to annual vegetables, the plot will likely support fruit trees and other perennials. “We will definitely be practicing-organic!” Houde says.

A Green Innovation Grant awarded to Nell Houde ’18 will be used to start a garden that will supply vegetables to Dining Services. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Dining Services will not only reimburse the garden program for produce but pay for summer interns to work the plot. During the school year, �ֲ���ý EcoReps, members of the college’s student sustainability corps, will work the garden. “Farming happens best when there’s a community of people invested in it,” says Houde, whose experience includes a stint with the local Lots to Gardens urban agriculture program.

As in the first round of GIG funding, the new awards emphasize waste reduction through varied means — composting, recycling, and directing consumer habits away from single-use products.

Also like last year’s, some current projects will result from collaborations among people who individually proposed projects that have overlapping goals. This year’s eight grants, in fact, are responses to 12 group or individual applications.

The Maine firm Johnny’s Selected Seeds is one of the suppliers Nell Houde ’18, pictured in a college greenhouse, will use for the new �ֲ���ý garden she’s planning. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Last year, for example, several proposals addressed that goal of eliminating paper cups. But instead of cherrypicking one or two proposals, the committee asked all applicants with a paper-cup proposal to collaborate on devising a single solution — which, in the event, was to give every student a so-called personal reusable container as a substitute for paper.

With campus-wide compost collection now in its second year, four of the current GIG proposals aim to increase campus composting of food waste (as well as paper towels, which can be composted in limited quantities).

“So we’re doing something similar to last year,” Twist says. “We gave the compost goal $2,000, and we’re arranging for all of those folks” — students and Advancement staff, in this case — “to meet and sort out their ideas.” Composting on campus has “a lot of moving parts, and so the more people thinking and talking about it, the better.”

“Being innovative and impactful — those are the criteria that we’re most looking for.”

The individual compost-themed proposals ranged from simply increasing the number of compost receptacles on campus to hiring a student, equipped with an adult tricycle, to bring compost bins to a central pickup location for �ֲ���ý’ composting company, We Compost It! of Auburn. “That would save us a lot of money,” says Twist.

Other winning GIGs aimed at waste-reduction? On behalf of the �ֲ���ý Chemical Society, Nathanael Kuzio ’19 of Moretown, Vt., received $600 to implement a system in Dana Chemistry Hall for recycling used nitrile gloves. The society has engaged of Trenton, N.J., which specializes in processing such hard-to-recycle products as pens, chip bags, and cigarette butts.

Similarly, �ֲ���ý’ Admission office uses a Keurig machine to brew beverages for the many prospective students and families who visit. One result of this hospitality is a mess of K-Cups going into the waste stream, something that has caught the attention of visitors.

Some �ֲ���ý dormitories will soon sport new resource-conserving hand dryers like these Dyson Airblades in Kalperis Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

So Sherry St. Amant, Admission office manager and assistant to the dean, won a $400 GIG to enroll in Keurig Green Mountain’s program, which sells bins for collecting and returning spent K-Cups to the manufacturer. “Grounds to Grow On separates the coffee or tea grounds from the cups,” St. Amant explains. “The grounds are composted and the pods are used to produce energy.”

While some GIG recipients are pondering how to gather used restroom paper towels for recycling, another seeks to boot the towels altogether. Olivia LaMarche ’20 of Lynnfield, Mass., and Adair Andre ’18 of Edina, Minn., submitted separate proposals for expanding �ֲ���ý’ complement of high-speed electric hand dryers in one or more dorms.

LaMarche points out that �ֲ���ý, every year, runs through about 750 cases of paper towel rolls and 110 cases of folded, single-sheet towels — all told, about four million feet linear feet of towels. “Our recycling facility, Casella Waste Systems, no longer accepts paper towels because they are too expensive to recycle in large quantities, so the majority of them are sent to the Lewiston landfill,” she says.

High-speed dryers like the Dyson Airblades that �ֲ���ý already uses in a few buildings “are without a doubt more in the long term,” Andre says. But they’re expensive up front: LaMarche and Andre’s final project will likely result in only three new installations.

Thanks to a Green Innovation Grant awarded to two members of the physics department, denizens of Carnegie Science Hall will be able to both refill reusable bottles and drink directly at a chilled water station like this Elkay model in Kalperis Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Meanwhile, Matt Jadud, Colony Family Professor of Digital and Computational Studies, received a $250 GIG to pilot an open-source energy-sensor project that will tie into the existing network for monitoring the interior warmth of campus buildings. It’s hoped, Twist explains, that Jadud and his students can beat the high cost of commercial sensors.

Finally, two projects take on water issues. Nicole Hastings, assistant in instruction in the physics department, and physics professor John Smedley received a $900 GIG for a water-bottle refilling station in Carnegie Science Hall, as there’s not enough clearance in the sinks and bubblers to fill today’s tall bottles. And Joanna Vollrath ’21 of Menlo Park, Calif., will use about $900 in GIG funds to replace all 60 shower heads in Merrill Gym with high-efficiency models.

One sweet aspect to the Green Innovation Grants, as Twist points out, is that the program itself was paid for by green innovation: The $10,000 annual GIG budget is funded from savings achieved as �ֲ���ý, under the initiative of energy manager John Rasmussen, has dramatically reduced its energy consumption budget in recent years — from a high of approximately $4 million annually to the current $3 million.

GIG, says Twist, has “been a really successful project, and one that really gives students a lot of momentum in terms of getting their hands dirty and changing the sustainability culture of the campus. We’ll see how it goes, but I think it’s been really effective so far.”

Green Innovation Grants awarded for 2017–18

Additional compost collection bins could be stationed around campus as the result of a Green Innovation Grant. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Proposals (two combined): Install high-speed hand dryers in dorms
Submitted by: Olivia LaMarche ’20 and Adair Andre ’18
Amount awarded: $2,000
Goal: Reduce use of paper towels

Proposals (four combined): Expand compost collection (and paper towel recycling) on campus
Submitted by: Lori Larsson, Eileen Messina, Sarah Bernard (staff); Heather Fear (staff); Elizabeth Colcannon ’21; Kenza Nadifi ’21
Amount awarded: $2,000
Goal: Reduce �ֲ���ý’ waste stream through composting

Proposal: Create new �ֲ���ý garden
Submitted by: Nell Houde ’18
Amount awarded: $1,885
Goal: Create a sustainable source of fresh produce for Dining Services

Proposal: Replace shower heads in Merrill Gym with low-flow models
Submitted by: Joanna Vollrath ’21
Amount awarded: $900
Goal: Save water

Proposal: Water bottle filling station in Carnegie Science Hall
Submitted by: Nicole Hastings and John Smedley, physics department
Amount awarded: $900
Goal: Reduce use of disposable water bottles and encourage healthy hydration

Proposal: Recycle single-use lab gloves in Dana Chemistry Hall
Submitted by: �ֲ���ý Chemical Society
Amount awarded: $600
Goal: Reduce disposable gloves going into waste stream

Proposal: Process spent K-Cups through Grounds to Grow On program
Submitted by: Sherry St. Amant, Admission office
Amount awarded: $400
Goal: Improve Admission visitor experience and reduce K-Cups going into waste stream

Proposal: Pilot project for ubiquitous temperature sensing
Submitted by: Matt Jadud, Digital and Computational Studies
Amount awarded: $250
Goal: Create temperature sensors to support campus heating control

Maybe you’ve heard of No-Shave November, during which facial hair becomes a symbol of support for men’s health awareness.

Well, at �ֲ���ý, mustache awareness faces competition this month from No Waste November, a series of events dedicated instead to environmental health — specifically curtailing how much waste goes to the Lewiston landfill, and broadly cultivating sustainable waste-disposal habits.

Designed by the student EcoRepos, this poster says what’s in store during No Waste November, including the Trashion Show on Nov. 15.

Featuring a “waste audit” on Nov. 12 and culminating on the 15th with the ever-popular Trashion Show, No Waste November is brought to you by Dining Services, the �ֲ���ý sustainability office, and that office’s student EcoReps.

Held in Commons’ Fireplace Lounge, a seven-hour clothing swap kicked off the series on Nov. 6. The idea, of course, was that students would bring in unwanted garments and, hopefully, take away new-to-them items that struck their fancy.

The holy grail of wardrobe optimization was an important impetus, but the swap also likely diverted a big box of idle apparel from the waste stream, as leftovers from the event will make an intermediate stop at the Trashion Show for further swappage and then end up at Goodwill or the Salvation Army.

Perhaps most important, though, the swap also called attention to the stunning amount of usable clothing that gets thrown away, and to the overall environmental impacts of the fashion industry.

“It’s kind of remarkable how much pollution comes out of it,” said Madeline McGonagle ’18 of Concord, N.H. She and Sophia Thayer ’18 of West Boothbay Harbor, Maine, both EcoReps, organized the swap.

In a 2016 article, reckoned that Americans toss out 14 million tons of clothing annually, or 80 pounds per person. The magazine noted that in 2012, 84 percent of unwanted clothes went into either an incinerator or a landfill.

“You know I love a good purple!” says Saleha Belgaumi ’18 of Karachi, Pakistan, as she chooses a shirt from the clothing swap in the Fireplace Lounge in Commons on Nov. 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

One factor driving this tidal wave of garments is the “fast fashion” industry, which, in conjunction with the digital acceleration of shopping habits, has deranged the traditional fashion calendar. The two traditional fashion seasons, fall-winter and spring-summer, have given way to a barrage of “micro-seasons.” (As many as 52, according to the .)

“That means you’re constantly buying and discarding clothing,” said Tom Twist, �ֲ���ý’ sustainability manager. “It’s pretty ridiculous.

“I don’t think a lot of �ֲ���ý students fall into that trap — they’re generally more thoughtful than that,” Twist said. (Three EcoReps that we talked to prefer to buy second-hand clothing.)

“This has been on the students’ radar for a while, and they’ve been looking for practical ways to do something about it,” Twist said. In fact, �ֲ���ý has held a number of clothing swaps, although the Nov. 6 event was the first structured as a daylong drop-in.

The busiest times for the swap, naturally, were around lunch and dinner. We dropped in around 1 p.m., when Thayer and another EcoRep, Adair Andre ’18 of Edina, Minn., were staffing the event.  (There are 32 EcoReps this year, an all-time high.)

By then there was a lull and we got to admire two of Andre’s finds, a scoop-neck sweater in soft gray cotton and a blue blouse that’s 100 percent, as the auctioneers say, in the silk.

Out of the bag

A waste audit held in 2009. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Up next for No Waste November is the waste audit on Nov. 12. EcoReps will visit �ֲ���ý’ 10 largest student residences and take away three bags of trash and three of recycling from each dorm. Sorting and weighing the contents, they’ll do an analysis to better understand residents’ habits and, by extension, the efficacy of college efforts to encourage more and better recycling.

“It’s going to be right in front of Commons,” said Hadley Moreau ’19 of Falmouth, Maine, one of the EcoReps organizing the audit. “The idea of that is to raise publicity — people walking into Commons will see us doing it.”

Twist hopes to find some functional answers in the 60 bags of refuse that the EcoReps will pick through. He’s wondering, for example, about the habit-forming power of waste curtailment measures taken last winter — a drive to replace paper coffee cups with personal reusable containers, and the deployment of waste receptacles that, among other refinements, added composting to the disposal choices.

“Are our efforts working — are we seeing an increase in recycling, based on all the marketing that we’re trying to do?” he wonders. “How much of the residence trash could have been recycled or composted? Are there things that we could be capturing that we’re not?”

Hopefully the audit itself will further those goals. As an EcoRep, Moreau has given sustainability presentations to many first-year students —work that has taught her that not everyone knows about practices that others take for granted.

Citing Maine’s returnable beverage-container program, she pointed out that people from other states “don’t know what returnables are. And some people don’t know what compost is. People come from different backgrounds.”

Goggles in hand, Elise Krims ’16 hits the 2015 Trashion Show runway wearing Kevin Tejada’s design “Phoenix Rising From the Ashes.” Tejada said of his creation, “If Barbarella and Madonna had a child, this would be her.” (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

She says, “I think environmentally conscious people sometimes assume that other people know more than they actually do.”

Finally, taking refuse from thrown-away to runway, the Trashion Show follows the Harvest Dinner on Nov. 15. Andre and Thayer, behind-the-scenes veterans of the show, have fond memories of this fashion extravaganza where the couture is fabricated from discarded teabag packets, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish bags, foil yogurt seals, magazines, coffee cups, and other salvage from the dustbin.

Thayer recalled a Miley Cyrus-style bubble miniskirt crafted from paper cups, and both students hailed the designs of Kevin Teijada ’17 as the ultimate in Trashion style — “amazing,” as Andre said, citing the 2015 ensemble “Phoenix Rising From the Ashes” that Tejada styled for model Elise Krims ’16. The outfit featured a bustier, collar, and goggles made from beverage cans, as well as fringed wings, repurposed from videotape, trailing from Krims’ otherwise bare arms.

While the basic spectacle will remain the same this year, the Trashion Show program will be tweaked a bit. The show will be held as usual amidst a cornucopia of desserts in the Gray Athletic Building, but Dining Services has taken steps to make the dessert service refuse-free. (Because who can refuse a delicious dessert?)

And Thayer noted that the EcoReps will strive to get the waste-reduction message of the show to a larger audience for a longer time. “We’re focused on events with impact,” she said — “continuing impact.”

If you took all the paper coffee cups that the dining Commons goes through in a typical year and laid them end to end, that line of cups would be nearly long enough to connect Lewiston with Portland, about 36 miles away. And it would number about 750,000 cups.

But if your bucket list includes linking the two cities with a line of used �ֲ���ý-branded paper cups, you’ve missed your chance. As of April 24, as a way to reduce the waste that �ֲ���ý sends to the local landfill, Dining Services will no longer stock paper cups in Commons. (They’ll still be available in the Bobcat Den.)

A poster created by �ֲ���ý EcoReps illustrates the environmental burden created by paper cups.

From the sustainability standpoint, paper cups are a sorry proposition. Manufacturing them requires lots of trees, water, and energy (usually from fossil fuels), and still more fuel to transport them — all for something that you’ll use once and then throw at the wastebasket.

The environmental insults don’t stop there. The same wax or plastic linings that make paper hot-beverage cups leakproof also make them prohibitively difficult to recycle. Student interest in seeing the end of paper cups in Commons has been building for some time, and last fall the college decided to drop the cups from Commons once and for all.

“They aren’t consistent with Dining Services’ philosophy, and certainly not with the institution’s move towards a more sustainable culture,” says Christine Schwartz, assistant vice president for dining, conferences, and campus events.

Knowing, however, that Commons patrons will always want to take a post-prandial cuppa away with them, Dining Services is revamping its beverage-container offering in Commons even as it eliminates the paper cups.

Mugging for the camera: Like every other �ֲ���ý student, Laura Rand ’18 of Barrington, R.I., will soon have a personal reusable container like this to call her own. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

If Dining Services is taking away the paper cups with one hand, with the other it is giving every �ֲ���ý student a dandy replacement: a lidded, insulated stainless-steel mug, complete with carabiner to hang it from a backpack. These so-called personal reusable containers, or PRCs, come with not only lids and carabiners but a bit of social engineering power as well.

“You have personal responsibility for that mug. It’s on the student to take accountability for their role in being sustainable,” says Hannah Slattery ’18. An environmental studies major from New Hampshire, Slattery is a �ֲ���ý EcoRep and a member of both the Committee on Environmental Responsibility and the “mug committee” that devised the cup elimination plan.

The PRCs will be rolled out via a “smoothie promotion” on April 10, the Monday of finals week. “You’ll get your mug, you get a smoothie, and then we’re going to encourage students to bling their mug,” says Schwartz — with stickers, gewgaws, trinkets, doodads, and other bling courtesy of Dining Services.

Laura Rand ’18 demonstrates the new mug-washing station in Commons, which makes life more hygienic for folks toting their own mugs around — as every �ֲ���ý student who’s on campus will soon be doing. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Another encouragement comes in the form of a new mug-washing sink that’s been in service in Commons since February.

In other changes to Commons drinking technology, the current 7.5-ounce plastic tumblers for soda and water will be replaced with 12-ounce models, and a line of 12-ounce Melmac mugs for hot beverages will be added. Both products are for use only in the dining hall.

Given �ֲ���ý’ activist tradition, it’s not surprising that student interest helped drive the decision to dump the cups. (A measure of that interest is the fact that 1,204 students — out of a student body of around 1,700 — took part in the online vote to decide which of two cups would be the official PRC. The handle-and-carabiner model beat a shapely cup-holder design by 692 to 512.)

Even as Dining Services was looking more closely at the issue, Sustainability Manager Tom Twist and the Committee on Environmental Responsibility were seeking student proposals for Green Innovation Grants.

Three of the proposals submitted to the Committee involved getting rid of paper cups. For various reasons, none of the proposals were fundable as submitted — but by providing ideas that wound up in the final plan, they lit a path toward the goal.

“We decided to get all of those people together, get all of the energy together, and find a solution that could work for everybody,” says Slattery. In fact, the mug committee was formed around two of the cup-proposal applicants, Owen Ahlborn ’19 and Julia Panepinto ’20. (Panepinto applied for the grant on behalf of the volleyball team.) Also on the committee are Schwartz, Dining Services Director Cheryl Lacey, Twist, Slattery, and another EcoRep, Olivia LaMarche ’20.

Christine Schwartz’s blinged-up Personal Reusable Container suggests an approach to distinguishing one’s own PRC from all the rest. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“The way the plan is now unfolding is really driven by students,” Schwartz adds — “the students on the committee, and them talking to their friends, and their friends talking to their friends. So it’s been a great experience.”

Students who don’t find the student-elected PRCs appealing can opt for a voucher worth the cup’s purchase price, says Schwartz. The vouchers will be redeemable for other models of mug at the College Store. “You’ll have to pay the difference between your voucher and whatever you choose, but it’ll at least subsidize you if you want to make a different choice.”

Students made it clear that the official PRC should be provided exclusively to students. “They don’t want us to sell those particular ones or have them in the bookstore,” Schwartz explains, “because they want it to be a unique item, a signature item for students.”

�ֲ���ý EcoReps are student employees of the sustainability office. One of five tasked with media and outreach, Slattery has been instrumental to marketing the cup plan. Posters, email blasts, tabling sessions, napkin-holder texts, and meetings with other �ֲ���ý organizations have all been part of that effort.

The cup project presents an opportunity to raise broader awareness of �ֲ���ý’ sustainability score, Slattery points out. “We thought we should go a step further — to take a cohesive plan about cups and make it a larger plan about sustainability,” she says, “and frame it in a way where it’s not just about replacing the cups, it’s about having each student take personal responsibility for their environmental actions.”

“This is really a push on campus to amp up what we’re already doing” to advance �ֲ���ý sustainability, Schwartz adds. “These environmental initiatives aren’t something new, but something that have been here for a long time and have now really become a focus of the institution. And that’s mostly due to the interest of students.”

Now a dominant part of trash that Commons sends to the landfill, paper cups are about to vanish from �ֲ���ý’ dining hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

If you’re asking people to behave sustainably and sort their trash as they throw it away, it’s only fair to make their choices as clear as possible.

“Apparently people decide where they’re going to put their trash when they’re about five to 10 feet away from the bins,” says Tom Twist, �ֲ���ý sustainability manager.

Accordingly, in collaboration with the �ֲ���ý Communications design team, Twist has come up with a standardized configuration for waste-sorting stations that’s intended to guide people as they unburden themselves of Snickers wrappers, paper napkins, apple cores, Sanpellegrino cans, etc.

�ֲ���ý Sustainability Manager Tom Twist poses next to a Pettengill Hall waste-sorting station. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

New compartmented bins in about 30 public locations around �ֲ���ý are color-coded and marked with signage that, Twist says, is “readily visible from afar.” The signage relies on icons, along with text, to indicate what goes where — recyclables, compostables, returnables, fodder for the landfill, etc.

Fabricated from a material made mostly of recycled plastic milk jugs, the bins are custom-built for �ֲ���ý by a Wisconsin company, Max-R. “I think we have some of the nicest-looking, the most functional bins I’ve ever seen,” Twist says.

The redesign is part of an effort, begun a few years ago under Twist’s predecessor, to get the �ֲ���ý community to recycle more of its refuse. As a percentage of the overall waste stream, “our recycling rate is 34 percent,” Twist says, while an estimated 75 percent of all refuse is actually recyclable.

“We’re trying to come up with a reasonable goal for the college,” he explains. “We’re kicking around the idea of getting to 50 percent recycling in the next several years.”

Four �ֲ���ý EcoReps — Isa Moise ’19 of Mount Vernon, N.Y., Beanie O’Shea ’18 of Somers, Conn., Hannah Slattery ’18 of Gilford, N.H., and George Fiske ’19 of West Hartford, Conn. — show off one of the college’s new waste-sorting stations, in Pettengill Hall. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Recycling is a question of folding green as much as sustainability green, Twist adds. It costs �ֲ���ý about half as much to dispose of the recyclable portion of its refuse as it does to send non-recyclables to the Lewiston landfill.

In fiscal year 2016, �ֲ���ý paid about $60–80 for each of the 267 tons of trash that went to the landfill. In contrast, it cost about $35 per ton for the 138 tons of recycling that went to Casella Recycling Service.

“It’s not that people are intentionally not sorting their stuff,” says Olivia LaMarche ’20 of Lynnfield, Mass. She’s involved in the waste-stream program as a �ֲ���ý EcoRep. “It’s just that they’re really not sure what can be recycled, or they’re not positive whether a bin is for recycling or trash.”

The new system is designed to minimize such uncertainty. Hence the standardized bin colors and icons, and the distilling of the icons for maximum clarity.

“We have thought about everything down to the minutest detail, in terms of social engineering,” says Twist.

The new waste-receptacle system broadens compost collection beyond Dining Services for the first time at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

For instance, “we intentionally made the recycling compartment of the bins much larger than the trash side, to send a visual cue that you are supposed to be recycling more than you are throwing out.

“We changed the ‘Trash’ sign to ‘Landfill,’ to get people to pause and think.”

One of the most significant changes with the new system is that it captures food waste — and, perhaps surprisingly, paper napkins and paper towels — for composting.

Of course, the tray return line in Commons and a sorting station in the Bobcat Den have diverted food waste from the landfill for years, but food discarded elsewhere on campus did go to the landfill. Now, thanks to the new sorting stations, much of it can be recovered for composting.

Twist explains, “We’re within six miles of southern Maine’s largest industrial composter,” We Compost It!, which has a processing facility in Auburn. That firm has a pickup service that, similar to non-food �ֲ���ý recycling, ends up costing about half of landfill disposal. (In FY 2016, the college sent 131 tons of material to be composted or fed to pigs at a local farm.)

A disposal station in the Pettengill Hall lobby is, if you will, the flagship of the compost-ready waste-bin fleet. “That was the first location that had compost collection outside of Dining Services,” Twist says. “It was kind of a nerve-wracking thing to start, since it had been tried before and failed.

“There are few things that go south faster than poorly planned food waste collection.”

“There are few things that go south faster than poorly planned food waste collection.”

Another major advance in the new waste-disposal platform is the capacity to separate liquids from the rest of the refuse — and contain them neatly. This is accomplished with bins that have funnels inset into the top that feed watertight containers, which are emptied down the drain.

Segregating liquids is important for a few different reasons. For one thing, paper or plastic that has gotten wet can’t be recycled. In other words, a quarter-full cup of chai dropped into a recycling bin, says LaMarche, “just ruins the recycling.”

Another reason is aesthetic: It’s simply discouraging to the custodians to deal with trash bags leaking old coffee or milk into the refuse bin or across a freshly mopped floor.

The new waste stations’ liquid-collection system makes life nicer for custodians and helps keep stray liquids from spoiling recyclables. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

In fact, says Twist, the new waste-handling system makes life easier in a variety of ways for �ֲ���ý’ grounds and custodial crews, the folks on the front lines of refuse collection. “A lot of times it’s just been a pain the neck for them. We’re trying to streamline that, to make it really easy.”

For example, the new bins open in the front for changing the bags. That’s an ergonomic improvement over the old bins, which opened at the top, making custodians lift full bags of trash straight up and over the bin.

“We put casters on them so you can roll them from place to place to clean the floor,” Twist adds. And color-coding extends to the trash bags, to ensure that the refuse remains properly sorted after they’ve been removed from the bins.

With the Max-R sorting stations installed only in public spaces on campus, the new system isn’t comprehensive. In the dorms, especially, a variety of sorting facilities still prevails and there’s a ways to go on upping the percentage of recycling.

But the public stations have been working well, says LaMarche, whose contributions to the effort included obtaining grant money to expand compost collection.

She says, “I’ve learned that every person can have an impact. And so just doing what we’re doing, trying to educate students about what happens to waste, where it goes, where to put their waste — every student we reach in some way can actually make a big difference in the long run.”

Pettengill Hall, where the waste collection stations made their campus debut, is home to several of them. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

From left, Kahea Mueller ’15, Linnea Brotz ’15 and Singha Hon ’14 work on their group design for the Trashion Show. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

“I think we all do it,” Linnea Brotz ’15 said with a mouthful of pretzel, cutting up notes from a class to make an extra flourish on a trash bag dress. “You have an old plastic bag, you want to reuse it and you alter it,” she mused.

A modest but seasoned trashionista, Brotz of Berkeley, Calif., was underselling her impressive history with costuming at �ֲ���ý. Singha Hon ’14 of New York City, one of her design partners and the model for the �ֲ���ý Trashion Show just a few days away, similarly waved away any notion of difficulty in their task while preparing her outfit.

Hon, Brotz and their partner Kahea Mueller ’15 of Rye, N.Y., were just three of the fashion designers working away in mid-November to perfect their attire for the most glamorous fashion event involving used Commons napkins: the �ֲ���ý College Trashion Show.

Pitting students, staff and other �ֲ���ý community members against one another in a friendly quest to make recycling fashion-forward, the well-attended event takes place every year before November break and directly after Harvest Dinner, �ֲ���ý’ spin on Thanksgiving.

From left: Singha Hon, judge Annie Cravero ’13, designer Folarera Fasawe ’15 and Fatima Sacko ’15 during the 2013 Trashion Show. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

In the event, which took place Nov. 20, Hon and Brotz’s design won the title “Most Sensational,” which seems to fit their fashion vision from the get-go.

During the design phase, earlier in the week, Brotz and Hon appeared to agree on their main inspiration: Beyoncé. “You definitely need a crown,” reasoned Brotz. “Just like Queen Bee in ‘Bow Down.’ ” Hon earnestly affirmed this decision.

While emulating Beyoncé, though, their fashion perhaps was more reliant on plastic bags, recycled paper and cardboard than on the Queen Bee herself.

“I was hoping we were going to be punk,” added Brotz, when asked about her vision for their trashionwear. “Frills up, but with nails. We need a choker. …We should make you a scepter.

“That’s exactly what you need.”

Hon brought in considerable knowledge from the costuming she wore in this year’s fall mainstage theater production, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play). And hints of this Victorian period piece carried over into her almost-steampunk take on an ornate traditional dress.

It seems clear, then, that Brotz and Hon’s casual prowess in the trashion world can’t be matched by simply cutting up a couple of plastic bags. Unlike many of this year’s designers, Brotz and Hon both have considerable experience working at the �ֲ���ý costume shop.

Brotz took an independent study in the costume shop on pattern drafting, learning the basics and coming out of the class with a jacket and dress made for her. Not only did this experience improve her costuming ability but her math as well, Brotz noted. Enlarging a drawing up from 1/50th scale to full size for a pattern is pretty difficult, she noted, though it seems both to have paid off and been very much in the vein of �ֲ���ý’ liberal arts core.

Brotz also helped Annie Cravero ’13, last year’s Trashion Show grand winner and this year’s visiting alumna judge, with her winning ensemble as well.

Hon, a double major in art and visual culture and in theater, spent the summer working for a custom denim company in Brooklyn. She’s interested in bringing together her interests in theater and in “making things,” whether in the form of performance art or other experimental mediums, such as trashion design.

“I lived with seven fashion designers when I was [studying] in London who were all very fierce,” Hon added. “I was making paintings out of fur.” She came back to �ֲ���ý interested in spicing up the campus’ take on outerwear.

For materials, like the other Trashion Show contestants, the pair had a lot of collecting to do and ample places to find the goods. “Basically I had a trash corner in my house and said to my friends, ‘Give me trash!'” Hon said. Pointing to the delicate plastic bows lining the front of her dress, she added, “we ate some chocolate for the cause.”

Other materials on her ensemble included spray-painted cardboard, bubble wrap, many plastic bags, a yogurt-lid crown (“This is the most narcissistic outfit,” Hon joked), netting and cut-up receipts and class notes.

Hannah Cover ’17 won the Most Creative award at the 2013 Trashion Show. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Though the competition awards winning titles at the end of the night, Hon and Brotz did not seem too interested in worrying about their competitors. On the contrary, they raved about Hannah Cover ’17 of Canton, Conn., and her wildly impressive skill.

Awarded as most creative, Cover crocheted can tabs to the front of her dress to create the illusion of impenetrable chain-mail, while ironing together plastic bags over and over to create a rewearable rubber material, which Cravero described as a “huge game-changer.” The �ֲ���ý Sustainable Athletes made their debut in this year’s event as well, one of the night’s many group-effort pieces to be displayed.

The judges were Kirk Read, associate dean of faculty and professor of French and francophone studies; Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Pamela Johnson; Hally Bert ’14, a �ֲ���ý Ecorep; and Annie Cravero ’13 winner of the 2012 Trashion Show.

Other awards went to designer Kevin Tejada and model Praneet Kang, both ’17, for best use of recycled materials; designers Folarera Fasawe and Jessica Clergeau, both ’15, and model Fatima Sacko for best overall; and local fifth-graders Elena Ray Clothier and Bridget Kahan, both designer-models, for emerging designer.

The event is run every year by the �ֲ���ý EcoReps, students employed in the ever-continuing crusade to make �ֲ���ý more environmentally sustainable.

The renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls boasts a long list of environmentally sustainable measures. Many are aimed at maximizing energy efficiency in the completed buildings, such as automated lighting controls and solar-heated domestic water.

Others have diverted from the waste stream all kinds of materials discarded during the renovation process. Most of the old window units, for instance, were taken by an architectural salvage company. Discarded wood was chipped by the ton and burned as biomass fuel (with any nails left in the wood being picked up by magnets so the metal could be reused).

But not all the old wood went up in smoke. Some will come back to Hedge and the Bill in the coming weeks: old roof timbers that have been remilled and nicely finished for use as window sills.

The sills will afford a way to remember the buildings’ old bones, now substantially replaced by steel and brand-new lumber. “We haven’t settled on the final look” for the sills, says project manager Paul Farnsworth. “But they will have some character, with the stains where the nails were and that sort of thing.”

At Hedge Hall, the big news is the completion this week of the “storefront” — glass walls to us civilians — on the stair tower facing Alumni Walk. Three stories tall, the glass was substantially done by Feb. 28 or so, with workers continuing to ride cherry pickers into the air to touch up trim during the week.

Behind the plastic curtain, you can see bricks stacked up, ready for the masons working on Roger Williams Hall. Photographed March 2, 2011.

Roger Williams Hall in the afternoon sunlight on March 1, 2011.

Roof slates on the north side of Hedge Hall, photographed March 1, 2011.

The new glass on the Hedge Hall stair tower and the cherry pickers that have enabled workers to install it, photographed March 1, 2011.

Pre-plastic wrap, the staging is up and the bricks are awaiting the masons who will lay the veneer on the Roger Williams Hall addition. Photograph taken on the iPhone, Feb. 24, 2011.

“Doesn’t it look nice?” Farnsworth asks. Yep.

Above the stair tower, still on the Alumni Walk side, roofers are progressing with the dark-gray slate that is covering the building. They’ll head over to Roger Williams soon.

Below the tower, work proceeds on the new entrance, comprising a glassy vestibule bracketed by brick piers that, Farnsworth reports, have just been finished.

Inside Hedge, the room-building machine chugs on. Walls are getting their first coats of color paint and bathrooms their tile. The electrical rough-in is done, and the plumbing is largely so, with the installation of fixtures the remaining step. And, Farnsworth notes, cabinetry will be showing up soon.

Across the frozen tundra at Roger Williams Hall, the building’s second set of stairs is being built as this is written. If you stand on the Library Quad facing the stair tower, which is that open section between the brick-red and Blueskin-blue portions of the Bill, the gray metal you see zig-zagging upward is part of the stairs.

As of March 2, they had the zig-zagging stringers and the “pans” — into which concrete will be poured to form stair treads — done up to the third floor, Farnsworth says.

You can also see silvery metal wall studs in the stair tower, as an interior wall will partition the tower from top to bottom. Project planners considered using glass for that interior wall, but the fire-rated glass specified by the building code would have been too expensive.

Also conspicuous is the plastic wrap that workers have draped around the Roger Williams addition in recent days. As we have explained before, the plastic will hold in heat, which allows mortar to cure properly, which means the brickwork doesn’t fall apart, which means that masons can keep laying brick and granite without their work turning into a Three Stooges routine. “The mortar the merrier!” “Ow!” etc.

The room-makers are also going like gangbusters inside the old section of the Bill — hanging sheet rock, running pipes and wires. (But that work will come later in the addition.) A fourth-story ceiling designed to contain insulation below the roof is pretty much finished, clearing the way for the wall-stud guys.

Speaking of energy efficiency, the blown-in cellulose insulation will make a layer more than a foot thick, Farnsworth says. With a minimum R-rating of 42, it’s a far cry from the years when the heat went right out the roof.

And the Bill’s elevator is being put together as this is written. But it, like Hedge’s lift, won’t go into service until late in the renovation, when the building’s phone system is online, which is needed for the elevator to pass inspection. Such are the ups and downs of the construction business. Ow! I’m sorry, Moe!

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail Doug Hubley, stating “I’m sorry, Moe!” in the subject line.