A month into the school year and the halls are busy, classes are attended and students are gearing up for midterms and assignments.

Some things never change — and the same can be said about waste disposal here at the college.

According to Mary-Lee Townsend, Fanshawe's sustainability coordinator, there doesn't appear to have been much change in terms of waste disposal on campus from previous years.

“We're still getting a lot of contamination in the garbage, particularly in the plastics,” said Townsend. “People are putting things like food and plastic candy wrappers in the plastics recycling, so we're not getting clean recycling at all.”

But that's not all.

“Compost from the back of the house, the kitchens, [is] really great. But as far as students composting, we're really not doing a good job there.”

This is a problem Townsend is keen on fixing, starting with visual aids.

“Our signage right now is not at eye level,” she said. “People have to stand back and look at the bins to be able to see what goes where.”

Townsend would like to have signs above the bins so passersby can easily have a glance before chucking away an item.

She said the downtown campus would have new bins with signs at eye level. “We're going to see what kind of a difference it makes at that location and try to bring that here to the main campus.”

The visual structure of trash and recycle items by Pizza Pizza in The Junction (D caf) has been helpful, she said. Townsend hopes to put something like it in every cafeteria on campus. “Just trying to think about what we can do to try and drive this message home about putting waste [away]. We recycle pretty [well] here, it's just the contamination piece.”

If a recycling or composting bin is contaminated enough, in all likelihood, its contents will end up in the trash. “That is what people need to realize is that if they're throwing an entire cup of coffee into the paper recycling, that paper recycling will just go into the garbage because it can't be recycled anymore,” said Townsend.

“People will put containers still full of food into plastics recycling, and that would also count as contamination. That's up to our cleaners to make that call.”

Townsend hopes to transition the college into a single-stream recycling system within the next five years.

“All the [materials] — cans, plastic [and] glass — can be recycled with paper. All recyclables in one container,” is what she's hoping for. She said it would eliminate one question for students.

“If you can eliminate a question, that makes [recycling] easier. People don't like to think about it,” she said. “They don't want to think about where things go.”

She said she thinks the College has a responsibility to be an example to the community. “What I'm aiming towards is trying to make Fanshawe an organization that people can look towards as an example of how we do things,” she said. “We're supposed to be welleducated and smart and capable, so we want to be able to show that we're doing that with waste diversion and other sustainability-related initiatives.”

Townsend will be heading up events with the Student Union for Waste Reduction Week, which runs October 21 to 25. Look forward to awareness campaigns like a Get Caught Recycling contest.

Get ready. Get set. Recycle, Fanshawe.