Hamilton’s Climate Action Plan promises to reach carbon neutrality by 2030, and the Hamilton community is working on a variety of levels to reach this goal. Yet, invisible to many students, Hamilton creates hundreds of pounds of food waste every day, in large part due to unsustainable practices from Hamilton students themselves.
Brian Hansen, Director of Environmental Protection Safety and Sustainability at Hamilton, said that Hamilton’s community was much more mindful about waste generation back in 2004, two years after Hansen arrived at the College, when Hamilton had historically high recycling rates at 25% of all generated waste. Today, despite continued efforts across campus, recycling rates have plateaued at 22%. Hansen worries about distraction. “[People] think that we have all these other things to do, whether it be carbon neutrality, decarbonization,” he said, “people forget about waste management.”
In addition to carbon neutrality, Hamilton has a goal to have 90% landfill waste diversion by 2030. This, according to the Sustainability Action Plan, means that, “Hamilton will aim to reduce its solid waste sent to landfills by 90% by 2030 as compared to the 2007 baseline.” Reaching this goal, according to Hansen, will require more than institutional changes, it will require changes in individual and community behavior. Hansen said that, “It’s about people and the things that we do on a day to day basis, it’s much more behavioral in nature.”
Hansen described how the College has seen an increase in the cost of removing waste. He explained that the cost for Hamilton’s waste removal service contrast increased by $93,000 just from 2022–23, from $287,000 to $380,000. To put it in perspective, he said, “So if the average cost of a student’s tuition dollars is $35,000, it’s ten students coming here, their tuition dollars directed to nothing more than waste and moving the trash and recycling off campus.”
Lack of careful waste practices are a further financial burden on the College because of waste management’s careful detection of contaminated recyclable materials. Hansen explained that the trucks can detect black trash bags contaminating recyclable materials, which the driver then has to remove, at a $150 charge to Hamilton per bag.
With Hamilton spending so many tuition dollars on waste management, the Sustainability Working Group is trying to shift student practices in a more sustainable, and economic, direction.
The individual indifference toward waste management may come from misconceptions. Sara Soika, Environmental Health and Safety Specialist at Hamilton, talked about misinformation people believe about recycling. She said, “So it’s also a myth that it’s just going to the landfill anyway, right? It is going on the same truck, but there’s a divider on the truck and part of it’s recycling and part of it’s landfill.”
Hansen and Soika suggested that most people do not know about the complex working of the Oneida Herkimer Solid Waste Authority (OHSWA) in Utica. Hansen said, “We are used to people concerned saying, ‘Oh, I have a little bit of donut dust on my plate.’ It doesn’t matter.” At OHSWA’s single stream recycling facility, Hansen said recycling “goes up these big conveyor belts to a group of people where all they’re doing is picking out little pieces of trash. Otherwise, it goes to this big area where you have air jets and magnets and things pushing [to sort recyclables].”
According to an OHSWA spokesperson in their website’s “Single Stream Recycling Center Video,” recyclables go through an extensive sorting process into cans, cardboard and different types of plastic. Items are sorted into large bales and then the Authority markets the bales to manufacturers so they can produce new items out of the recycled materials.
Ellie Sangree ’24, a Hamilton Sustainability Coordinator, said that the OHSWA recycling center takes, “aluminum cans, paper, and whatnot and you can see the final product of these gigantic cubes of raw material.” These recycled materials feed back into a local and circular economy in the form of everything from Adirondack chairs to aluminum cans. Sangree hopes that if students learn about the importance of recycling at the local level, they may be more mindful about their practices.
The myths around recycling and waste management are the source of Hansen’s and Soika’s educationally framed focus. Hansen said, “Some of [the solution is] corporate responsibility. But it’s more than that. Really, at the end of the day, it’s trying to do what Hamilton does best, which is to tap into our educational prowess, whether it’s in the classroom or not.”
In order to reach more students, Hansen is focusing on establishing orientation programming so that first-year students have access to proper sustainability and waste practices right when they arrive on campus. Willa Karr ’25, a Hamilton Sustainability Coordinator, echoed the necessity of educating incoming students about Hamilton specific procedures and expectations. She said, “People are coming from everywhere…in the U.S., and from around the world.” Educating new students, according to Karr, is crucial to accommodating people coming from different backgrounds and upbringings as “most people have never even eaten at the dining halls before, that’s a bit overwhelming in itself.”
Hansen said that despite all of the hard work, research and investment in new technologies that he and Soika do on campus, “at the end of the day, we’re in the business of education. And so if we can educate our current students and future students on how to be prepared for the long term impacts of climate change, that’s the role we’re trying to fill.”
Educating a whole campus around careful sustainability practices remains a challenge. While the Hamilton Sustainability Coordinators are working hard alongside Hansen and Soika to reach carbon neutrality and sustainability goals by 2030, they report an absence of widespread knowledge about their efforts. Events such as the Hamilton Fall Sustainability Fair have low turnout from people outside of HSC or the Environmental Studies department. Karr said this year there were “like, only six people there.”
Karr said that she and the sustainability coordinators have discussed how, “people come to events when you offer them free food. But we’re leading a sustainability fair about waste management, we’re not going to cater Chipotle or something. It’s like, how do we get people here without bribing them?”
Sangree agreed that there is a pattern in campus culture to be incentivized by food or free items. For instance, as a sustainability worker, she noticed the accumulated waste from student organized events at the end of the academic year during Cram and Scram. In reference to Campus Activities Board’s Stuff-a-Cub event, she said, “We just uncovered this mountain of teddy bears, probably over 100 of them.” This moment led her to question how Hamilton as a community can change their values of attendance for events. She said, “I think we all know that it is a really good incentive for kids to go to programming and we don’t want to detract from that character. But we need to figure out what are some ways that we can prioritize experiences over stuff.”
In our current campus culture where many students attend events based on free food or items, Sangree asked, “It’s a common thread of ‘how do we replace a culture of excess with a culture of enough?’”
To promote a culture of sustainability education, Karr asked, “What if every class had some sort of requirement, to go to this [sustainability] talk we have or to go and see how our food waste is generated related to the curriculum?”
The Sustainability Action Plan suggests that, “Within Hamilton’s open curriculum, students are required to complete three writing-intensive courses, a quantitative and symbolic reasoning course, and a departmental course addressing social structural and institutional hierarchies. Currently there are no requirements for students to take courses that discuss sustainability topics.”
Sangree further sees the lack of education as a problem because “We’re taught for good reason in environmental studies to be skeptical of institutions and skeptical of corporations.”
Although she wants to see Hamilton divest from fossil fuel investments, she said institutional skepticism “can potentially get in the way of our actual progress.” She added, “[Students] put all of their energy into criticism toward divestment. I’m not sure that that’s ultimately that productive.”
Sangree thinks current sustainable efforts are unknown by a large portion of the Hamilton community. Programs like Harvest, overseen by Shey Sanges ’26 and Katie Rockford ’24, are saving around one hundred pounds of leftover food from Commons and 60–80 lbs from McEwen daily. These leftovers, according to Sanges, are donated to the Rescue Mission of Utica, Hope House, Catholic Charities of Rome, and Mother Marianne’s West Side Kitchen in Utica.
Harvest has made an important step in involving more of the campus communities in the sustainability and waste management efforts. For instance, Sanges reported that last year, “the total food saved was 12,322 pounds. We had 84 individual volunteers of just people who signed up for their shifts and then we had 17 groups, so that was like another approximately 119 [people] for a total of just over 200 [volunteers].”
She also spoke about the wider impact that Harvest is making. Sanges said, “One thing we’ve been talking to food pantries about recently is that they love the food that comes from Hamilton. Folks tell us that Hamilton food is the best food. It’s seasoned, it’s cooked already. All they have to do is reheat it.”
Sangree is another example of improving Hamilton’s sustainability through the Green Attributes Project. She said her project created a, “systemized plan for categorizing, delineating and then adding more naturalized features throughout Hamilton’s campus to try to cultivate sustainability in places that are not just the forests.”
From the many conversations she had through her development of the Green Attributes Project and her work with HSC, Sangree found that students are crucial to bridging the gap between departments on campus that may otherwise not be talking or working together. She said, “A student can kind of more easily and without bias navigate how interests might align while otherwise these conversations might not happen organically.”
Sangree emphasized the importance of working with faculty and staff on establishing sustainable practices. She said, “Getting faculty on the same page I think is way more of a priority [than students] because they set the culture for when new Hamilton kids arrive.” She explained that faculty is a more long-term solution than students, “We’re trying to work all across campus to understand how different groups view the issue of waste management.”
HSC, according to Sangree, is working with the Procurement Department, with a goal to, “Make it as easy as possible for them to transition their purchasing into more reusable, less single use kind of materials which we know make up a large amount of the waste on campus.” At the same time, Sangree works with a wide range of departments from Admissions to orientation programming to ensure sustainable practices are being taught on every part of campus.
There are also crucial institutional changes that will help reduce waste on campus. Hansen said, “It’s not all just behavior change. It’s making good contractual technology changes simultaneously to begin to narrow the gap.” For instance, Soika oversaw the implementation of a new liquid biodigester in Commons to minimize the amount of physical waste emerging from the dining halls.
She said, it uses “very big cells using oxygen to digest the food. There are enzymes similar to your stomach that help break the food down. Turns out we call it greywater and discharges to the wastewater treatment plant. So the other thing is this is a constant process, it goes all day long.”
Sangree said institutional support is crucial to reducing waste on campus. She said, “I think a lot of it is like making sure that sustainability is being funded properly. For example, awarding money to get better signage, getting better receptacles or areas costs money, but that’s an institutional investment.”
Sanges talked about Hamilton’s need to invest in hiring more staff in the dining halls. When
The Spectator
asked Sanges about the possibility of having a designated Parkhurst employee to sort food properly into compost, trash and recycling in the dining halls she cited a lack of staff. She said, “Absolutely, I think it’s a great idea. Just we don’t necessarily have the manpower to do that. Parkhurst is short staffed as it is, so they’re already giving a lot of resources to us [Harvest] in terms of employees helping us and it might not be the most practical thing right now.”
Hansen explained problems with composting rates in the dining halls and said he plans to oversee a return to scraping plates behind the conveyor belts by dining hall staff over students. After some construction a few years ago in Commons, he said, “they bumped the food scraping outside ultimately, to make everything work. We’re going to flop it back around for the scraping, so students would just put their plate with their food waste on it so it goes back to a Parkhurst person who does the scraping.” This plan’s implementation would go hand in hand with the development of the liquid biodigester, he said, “Our vision with this is that we put a second liquid biodigester right at the scraping lines …We’re just not there yet. We’re trying to make sure the liquid bio digester system works.”
Despite the hard work of Hamilton Sustainability Coordinators and the Sustainability Working Group, making the whole Hamilton community on par with their efforts is challenging. Changing campus culture’s attitude around waste and recycling will require intervention on multiple fronts.
Hansen cited Hamilton’s lack of self-service model for students as a contributing factor for wastefulness. A self-service model puts the responsibility of each student’s waste in their own hands. This is different from Hamilton student’s reliant model on Facilities Management because as Hansen said, “It’s full service. It’s custodians moving people’s waste.” If students bore the daily responsibility of disposing of their own trash and recycling outside, according to Hansen, they may be more mindful of the waste they generate.
Karr cited a lack of campus unity around sustainability and limiting waste. She said, “I don’t feel like the campus mentality is very environmentally inclined, which it kind of needs to be.”
On a campus in which students already have many different responsibilities, managing their individual waste is not a priority. Karr said, “We’re so used to being, go, go, go, like, take a cup to go because I need to be on the run walking to my class with a cup of coffee. But, we just have to think about certain aspects of our life that need to be slowed down and thought about exactly because the world can’t keep up with the way we’re doing.”
One of the most difficult challenges, according to Hansen, is how to, “get a community of 1800 students and 800 employees marching to the same drumbeat.” This unity is necessary in Hansen’s mind because, as he said, “you could have 30 people throwing paper and containers into the recycling container and one person comes in and throws a half-drunk coffee cup and it ruins all the efforts of everyone before it.” Although OHSWA has careful sorting equipment, Hansen said, “OHSWA reserves the right to reject loads of co-mingled waste.”
Hansen said, “The impetus has to be on those who are generating the waste, [they must] try to act in an appropriate way so it doesn’t contaminate the things downstream.” Hansen believes that “students have to be the primary audience,” simply because they are the largest demographic of people both generating waste and disposing of it.
Although student efforts towards waste management need to improve, it is difficult to decide what responsibility must be put on individual habits or regulations from above. Karr said, “What I struggle with is that I hate when the students are blamed because I’m a student, and I want to give us agency because we are adults. And I want us to be able to make decisions about what we do with our waste, right?” Despite this, she thinks intervention by the College itself is needed to counter lack of campus motivation around sustainability.
Because of Hamilton students’ tendencies to use single-use cups from the dining halls, Karr said, “It might come down to Hamilton, as an institution, limiting us and just not giving us the option [for disposable cups], which is sad because that treats us like children, but it could really limit the waste that we are producing.” Considering, according to Hansen, that Hamilton through Parkhurst spends almost $6,000 every week on purchasing single-use non-recyclable cups alone (or $204,000 over two semesters), Karr suggests that Hamilton as an institution may be responsible for reducing waste as they spend an immense amount of money on single-use products. With all Howard Diner meals and Little Pub’s lunches being served with single-use plates and utensils, Hamilton does not always give students options to be sustainable.
The school’s decision to eliminate trays from the dining halls many years ago to manage food waste, according to Hansen, was effective. He said, “[Students] liked those trays, but that was a principal portion control strategy, which is now just how we do things. Because what would happen to you to have your big tray [with] two plates of fries, pizza, salad, whatever… And so that helps limit food waste.”
Sangree agrees that depending on students’ individual behavior will not necessarily be effective. “I am a little bit uneasy addressing the personal responsibility question of students because I think students already have a lot to think about. And I think that a strategy that places the responsibility on students is not, at its core, a very strong strategy,” she said, adding that, “I think that you can’t really rely on people to make the right decision. But it may be that kind of a pessimistic view, but I think it makes sense given the million other things that students are doing.”
Sangree is instead focusing her efforts with HSC on working on easy signage for everyone to follow while sorting their waste and working with different departments around campus. She said, “you want to make the thinking on the part of students and people who are throwing things away as simple as possible. So having the signs be perfectly aligned to the kind of waste we actually encounter. Having the Fojo cup that is in your hand match the photo of the sign next to the waste bin is the most effective strategy.”
Sanges echoed a need for greater signage in the dining halls because of food waste coming off students’ plates. She said, “So it’s one thing for there to be a lot of food waste at the serving line, but there’s also a huge issue with the main dining hall where people are throwing away a ton of food at the end of meals.” Sanges has noticed, “It’s not necessarily all being composted, because people contaminate the compost with plastic cups, napkins, wrappers, whatever, so most of the compost is just contaminated with garbage and then you can’t actually compost it. Not a lot is actually composted.”
