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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Greening cream and crimson

Last fall, I wrote a column criticizing the carelessness of IU students when it comes to waste disposal and recycling, especially during tailgate season.

To be blunt, I doubt the mindsets of students have improved much since then.

However, IU Athletics is piloting a zero-waste program that allows Hoosier fans to compost their food waste during home football games this season.

The idea behind this “Greening Cream and Crimson” initiative is to cut down on unnecessary waste like half-eaten burgers, discarded paper napkins and the 
infamous red Solo cups.

IU Athletics is working with Bloomington-based JB Salvage and Green Earth Compost and Recycling to set up zero-waste stations throughout the concourse at Memorial Stadium, where educators and volunteers will be posted to assist football fans with properly disposing their waste and 
recyclables.

“We’ve never collected food waste,” Caryn Hojnicki, IU Athletic’s sustainability coordinator said. “That will be the new thing.”

A program like this has the potential to cut back on a substantial amount of garbage during football season and hopefully encourage students to recycle off the 
tailgate fields as well.

“It’ll be huge because food waste is the heaviest waste,” Hojnicki said.

Though the waste stations collecting compost will be limited to the stadium area, recycling bins will still be present on the tailgate fields. However, if you are pulling your car into the fields on game day, make sure to grab a recycling bag from volunteers to conveniently dispose recyclables.

I stand by my previous argument that recycling is not difficult. We simply need to be more mindful, more conscientious. We need to care.

The Athletics Department is also going to track how much food waste is composted instead of winding up in a landfill by participating in the EPA Food Recovery Challenge. By gathering this information, we can learn not only how much waste we are reducing, but also how much further we need to go to reach this “zero-waste” goal.

Hoosiers become especially wasteful on game days. But we cannot forget about the other days of the season that are just as important. We have Earth Day for a reason, but that shouldn’t be the only day we think about waste reduction.

According to a new study by the American Chemistry Council, Americans toss $640 worth of food a year, and only 15 percent of respondents were concerned about the environmental impacts of throwing away so much food.

Clearly, motivation, or lack thereof, is still an issue that must be addressed.

But for those students like myself who live in off-campus residential homes, paying for trash stickers isn’t exactly a fun time. However, recycling pickup is a free service.

Therefore, by recycling more, we create less trash that we have to pay for with trash stickers. And recyclables don’t need to be separated. It’s that easy, folks.

If we can cut down on food waste on game days with this new program, hopefully that will inspire us to continue waste reduction practices off the fields too.

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