Category Archives: Waste

WCU fights waste, recycles possessions from spring to fall

Leave a reply

from WCU Office of Sustainability Earth Week Bulletin, 4/22/19:

WCU Pack It Up – Pass It On
Earth Week: The Donation Drive Begins!

Students, as you sort through your possessions, packing up for the summer months, are you finding items you no longer wish to keep? Before you toss them, consider donating instead! Pack It Up-Pass It On is a campus wide initiative aimed at rescuing and rehoming unwanted clothing and household items. Donation bins have been placed in the lobby areas of all eight traditional and affiliated residence halls as well as the Village Clubhouse. If your items are in good condition, simply deposit them in these conveniently located bins and know that they will find new life and use with someone else! All items will go to a campus yard sale at the start of the fall semester (keep checking back for dates)! The proceeds of the sale will go towards supporting the program for the next year.

Off campus students, open drop off hours will be available to you from 11am to 2pm on Saturday 4/27, 5/4, and 5/11 at the South Campus storage containers. The containers are located in Y Lot by the South Campus Apartments on South Campus Drive. Look for the signs! Email wcupacknpass@gmail.com with any questions. And look for the Pack It Up – Pass It On table at Tuesday’s Earth Fair (donations of smaller items and clothing accepted at this time). Let’s ditch the dumpster WCU!

Make Your Grocery Game Zero-Waste

Leave a reply

By Mukta Patil, Sierra Club, Feb 4 2019

Five ways to render grocery shopping easier on the planet—and your wallet

Shopping for groceries can be overwhelming. Once you get past the sheer volume of products staring down from the aisles, you’ve got to reckon with their ingredients, prices, and the way the food is packed. For environmentally conscious shoppers, the latter—excessive packaging and the resulting pollution—is especially irksome. Enter the zero-waste grocery store.

These small-but-budding enterprises are increasingly popping up, and they’re promising plastic-free, packaging-free products ranging from grains and produce to detergent and shampoo. The original zero-waste grocery story was the late in.gredients in Austin, Texas, which unfortunately shut down last April after five years of selling exclusively (un)packaged and locally sourced food. In its wake, however, in.gredients hatched a trend. The similarly modeled Package Free Shop cropped up in Brooklyn in 2017. Vancouver’s Nada opened in June 2018. Nada owner Brianne Miller, a marine biologist, says her zero-waste store and cafe was inspired by her research travels, which made her realize just how widespread plastic pollution was. “We want to inspire a better world by changing the way people shop for groceries,” Miller says. “Through these individual actions, we can reduce food waste and plastic pollution.”…

read more at Sierra Club