The Justice

SEA OF GARBAGE: Students for Environmental Action go through bags of trash in Ziv Quad garage for America Recycles Day. Photo by Benjamin Terris/theJustice

TONS OFJUNK: A construction vehicle moves piles of trash from the dumping pit en route to the compost digesters at We Care Environmental. Photo by Benjamin Terris/the Justice

Sitting at the helm of the 15,000-pound Chevy W5500 5ZL Diesel trash-compacting truck, my mind began to wander. I imagined myself flying down I-90 to California, recyclables and all. I was a green Jack Kerouac, stopping intermittently to pick up cardboard along the highway, compressing it in the back as I roared at a 75 mile-per-hour clip, windows down because there was no AC and singing to myself because there was no radio.

When I came to, I realized that I was navigating a small incline into Spingold Lot at a blistering three miles per hour.

How did I end up behind the wheel of Brandeis' trash and recycling truck? It all started with a mediocre grade, and this time it was the school, not the student, who received the disappointing report card. In a recent report, the Sustainable Endowments Institute--a Cambridge-based nonprofit-gave Brandeis a C for its overall sustainability. But it was the B the University received in the food and recycling subcategory that piqued my interest.

I decided that although the grade was a good jumping-off point to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Brandeis' waste management system, relying solely on the report would be insufficient. After all, only five people worked on SEI's 2008 Sustainability Report Card, and their task included grading 200 different colleges and universities. Sure, they could use Web sites and conduct interviews, but there was no way for them to really know what happens to Brandeis' waste exports. Fully understanding the system would require more comprehensive measures.

So I decided to take matters into my own hands: I would follow our waste wherever it went-from the trash receptacles in Brown to 2,000-degree waste-to-energy incinerators in Millbury, Mass., from the kitchens of Sherman and Usdan dining halls to compost digesting pipes in Marlborough, Mass. and from the recycling bins in Bernstein Marcus to the piles of cardboard and plastic in Framingham. My mission was not to debunk SEI's unflattering evaluation, but to gain a better understanding of how Brandeis takes care of its waste.



Taxonomy of a trash can

I started with a personal survey of our waste, and I found that Brandeis throws out quite an eclectic-and telling-collection of items. In the bowels of the University, I saw bags of garbage from across campus, the innards of which consisted of hundreds of Einstein's Bros. coffee cups, kosher cookie packages, pizza crusts, miniskirts, a purple hat from the Gap, seven full tennis ball cans, a French level 32 textbook, prescription pills of Xanax and Adderall, Advil bottles, soccer cleats, cans of paint, Crest toothpaste tubes, a McIntosh computer adapter, a bag of locally picked McIntosh apples and a bag of vomit. A peek into Usdan garbage pins revealed dozens of to-go containers, green beans, baked salmon, chicken pot pie crusts, Coca Cola cups, french fries and ketchup packets. Martinelli's apple juice containers and dozens of plastic soda and juice bottles filled a typical recycling bin in the Shapiro Campus Center.

In total, these items add up to between 1,000 and 2,000 tons of waste and recyclables annually. I couldn't help but wonder: Where does all of this stuff go?



A systematic overhaul

In order to deal with so much junk, the University has made a concerted effort to revamp its waste management program in the last couple of years, and no one has been more crucial to the process than Dennis Finn. Acting as the school's recycling coordinator and the vehicular supervisor, Finn is in charge of all waste mobility. In the past, Brandeis was responsible for collecting all the unsorted trash while leaving recycling collection and compost collection in the hands of hired trucking companies. For a long time, the way the University collected garbage was so inefficient that it did not have the time to deal with recycling internally, but Finn said this year has been a watershed in terms of organization

"[The change in our system] all started with a desire to improve the efficiency of the trash collection on this campus," Finn said. "It used to be we would collect trash using front-end loaders, the vehicles you see scooping up the ground around the peripheral road. It was like moving a pile of dirt with a tablespoon."

Instead of spoon-feeding dumpsters around campus with construction vehicles, Finn pitched the idea of purchasing a trash truck. Despite the initial cost of buying the truck and of installing two compacting dumpsters behind Epstein-all done this year- Finn said the improved effectiveness of garbage collection was enough for Brandeis to overhaul its system of recycling as well.

"Recycling used to involve a lot of middle-men," Finn said. "Let's say we generated some paper that we wanted to recycle. It would go from our desk-side baskets to either a Slim Jim-the tall thin container-or sometimes to a 90-gallon toter. Those toters were then taken by custodians and collected at numerous collection points. It used to be a contracted collector would come once a week and take those to a facility. It was riddled with problems. Sometimes the recycling toter would be contaminated with garbage, and [the collector] wouldn't pick them up, and there never was any way of knowing how much recycling we were doing. The contractors tried to estimate how much we were recycling, but when I checked my numbers against theirs, they were completely different. In reality we had no idea how much recycling we actually did."

Under the new system, the Brandeis compacting truck picks up all recycling and trash in different shifts and brings it to the lot behind Epstein. There, the truck drops each load into one of three different types of dumpsters: a compacting dumpster for cardboard, an identical but separate compacting dumpster for trash and an open-topped dumpster for the bags of bottles and cans.

Once everything is consolidated into the dumpsters, Wellesley Trucking will pick the garbage up and carry it to one of two places: a waste-to-energy plant for the nonrecyclables or a recycling plant for paper, plastic and glass. Meanwhile, we can still afford Wellesley Trucking to pick up our garbage directly from Usdan and Sherman and bring them to a composting facility.

Now, instead of relying on an outside source to keep track of our exported material, Brandeis can keep track of all it exports itself before sending it out. Finn hopes that within a year the school will have figures on all the waste and recyclables it sends out. For now, we have brand-new compacting dumpsters and a sweet new truck.



On the road

I spent most of the morning of Wednesday , Nov. 7 in the truck, squeezed between facilities staff members Mike Green and Jose Santana with a TV monitor sitting directly in my crotch.

"We have to have that monitor," Santana said of the unit, which showed a video feed of the road behind the truck. "It's mostly to watch out for bodies."

"Yeah," Green said. "We have to watch out for stray students." The two looked at each other with a grin and then burst out laughing.

"Man," Santana said. "Students are always walking around without looking. We're in a giant trash truck, and still many students just stand there when we are backing up."

The truck rumbled up to a Foster Mod dumpster surrounded by four overflowing bins.

"We're going to find some cardboard here," Santana said with a wink. He reached below the steering wheel and flipped a switch next to the accelerator. A red light turned on along with the hydraulics. Santana and Green took turns placing blue bins on a yellow platform-an appendage to the truck that can do the work of two men. The platform lifted up the bin-it can lift as much as 350 pounds -clamped a hold of it, turned it upside down and shook its contents into the back of the truck. At 7 a.m. the hydraulics had not completely warmed, creating loud groans and hisses and a seismic quaking of the vehicle. Students inside the Mods tucked their heads under their pillows to keep out the deafening groan.

Over the sound of screeching metal, Santana pined for the warmth of his Puerto Rican home, while the avuncular Green taught me some of his Irish lexicon. "'How's she cutting?' and 'What's the craic?' is like saying 'What's up?" he said with a thick accent. "Then, you got to answer, 'The craic is good, it's a great gas.'"

Green and Santana-two of the six men who operate this truck-seem to have a congenial if taciturn relationship and spend much of the day interacting with few words beyond "We gotta get the load over by Shapiro." Still, when asked about the nature of their jobs, both opened up. Although Santana and Green were quick to admit that the system of waste management at Brandeis has improved in many ways, they still acknowledge that things are far from perfect. Because the school is now in charge of collecting all the garbage on campus, the facilities staff's daily workload has increased. With three trips a day-one for garbage, one for cardboard and one for glass and plastics-they sometimes don't have time to get it all done.

"The plan is drawn out good, but sometimes in the process it gets corrupted," Green said. "There's just so much to pick up around campus it's impossible for two guys in one truck to get to everything. We would need more people and more trucks, but I understand that this is never going to happen. There're so many things that need money on campus that more money here would draw away from too many other things. Right now, though, we can just barely keep up with trash. There's barely enough help to go around."

The fact that one truck is responsible for all different types of waste also speaks to another supposed issue at the school.

"We get looks from students all the time thinking we are just tossing recycling into a garbage truck," Green said. "We get some pretty cold stares."

Knowing that it would actually be recycled, we were picking up piles of cardboard from Bernstein-Marcus and the Shapiro Campus Center when Green spotted an interloper in a bag of garbage. The squirrel looked up from under the black plastic with half a bagel in its mouth. Breaking the bread into a quarter-sized bite, it held the piece with both paws out in front of him as if in prayer. Looking up at the enormous white truck in front, the squirrel stood completely still before hiccupping, twitching and scampering into the brush.

"We've got them in trash barrels every morning," Green said. "We've found possums and even skunks. One employee got bit by a rat. He had to get a rabies shot. Man, we joke about that all the time. We say that Mikey's blood was so bad that it was the rat that died."

Our route took us to Kutz, the Farber library, the Abraham Shapiro Academic Complex and the International Business School before returning to the back of Epstein. There, I got to see the new cardboard compacting dumpster in action.

The truck backed up over a gravel hill right up to the brown, rectangular box. Santana jumped out from behind the wheel and turned a key that gave power to the compacting mechanism. The mechanical buzz of the dumpster harmonized with the moaning of the truck as the back door opened and the vehicle's compactor pushed cardboard into the pit. With the press of a final button, the walls of the dumpster began to close in on the garbage à la Indiana Jones in The Temple of Doom. The wall closed three times, pushing the recycling into another compartment of the dumpster and making space for a future load. With these compactors, Brandeis can now ship three times as much waste off campus per load as compared to the old system.

With the cardboard snugly compacted, Green turned to me with a smirk and, gesturing to the truck, said, "Want to take it for a spin?"



Students taking action, America recycles?


Green and Santana said they believe the University is doing all it can for waste management on the administrative level, and the community itself acts as the main countervailing factor.

"They do a lot of mixing on this campus, especially in places like grad housing," Santana said. "There's no point if you're going to put your trash in recycling. It all just becomes trash."

There is some dispute in the community, however, over exactly who is doing this mixing. Fingers can be pointed at members of the student body, the cleaning staff and the University's faculty, but pointing fingers never solves anything.

Instead, in order to educate the community as a whole, Students for Environmental Action have worked to voice the importance of recycling. When I attended a recent SEA meeting, I couldn't help but feel I had stumbled upon a progressive summer camp uprooted from the Green Mountains of Vermont and relocated in Shapiro's third-floor art gallery. From the positive attitudes and spontaneous bursts of applause right down to co-President Jamie Pottern's '09 Birkenstocks and multicolored toe socks, I would not have been surprised if somebody whipped out a guitar and led the group in a Pete Seeger sing-a-long. This club overflowed with a refreshing idealism that should be the archetype for college students everywhere. Having just come back from a 6,000-student conference in Washington, D.C, many of them felt they had the power to change the world.

Excitement was palpable when co-President Stephanie Sofer '09 announced what she called "one of SEA's biggest events to date": America Recycles Day. On Wednesday, Nov. 14, SEA would sort recyclables out of hundreds of bags of trash and then line the path from Farber library to the Shapiro Campus Center with these bags to demonstrate the amount of waste generated by the University and how much of it could have been recycled.

"[The administration is] letting us cover the University with bags of trash," Sofer said. "We are getting the green light for everything. It's amazing they are letting us do this. I hope there are, like, 20 different tours that day."

To prepare, I first went on a stakeout of Usdan during the lunch rush to get an idea of who was actually recycling. I watched as custodians picked up after numerous students, throwing their bottles into recycling bins and garbage into garbage bins. However, in the hour I sat in the cafeteria, I also saw eight students throw recyclable plastic bottles into trashcans.

Still, I had no idea what to expect when I went to the Ziv Quad garage the night before America Recycles Day to watch as students dissected Brandeis' trash.

In this dark basement, students went through 294 bags of garbage and removed 77 bags' worth of recycling. That means that at least 26 percent of Brandeis' garbage on the night of Nov. 13 could have been recycled. SEA members were quick to point out that more than one-third of the garbage could have been recycled, but because of water damage and contamination that occurred as it was mixed, it became unsalvageable.

The next morning, a row of black garbage bags traced the walk from the campus center to the library, forcing students to see just how much waste they produce in one night.

As revealing as this gesture was, I still had lingering questions. What happened to all of this stuff after the staff brought it to the dumpsters behind Epstein? Where, ultimately, were all these bags-the trash, the recycling and the compost-headed? I decided that since there was more trash than anything else, I would follow it first.



Cranes, flames and burning refuse


I pulled off Route 20 into the unmarked driveway that belonged to Wheelabrator Technologies' Millbury facility-a plant that disposes of refuse from around the area, including what we ship from Brandeis. Trash you throw away anywhere on campus-other than Usdan and Sherman-ends up in this type of facility. The only reason I knew that I was heading to the garbage-to-energy plant was because I was following a big, blue Allied Waste Services truck. The truck-outfitted with a yellow and black sign that read "caution" and nine blinking red, orange and yellow lights-cruised easily over a speed bump. My 1997 Toyota Camry had more trouble, its undercarriage scraping against the ridge of yellow pavement. Clearly this road was designed with trucks, not midsized sedans, in mind.

The Waste Services vehicle stopped on an in-ground scale for its initial weight measurement. (It would return after dumping its garbage to be weighed again and charged for the difference.) Not planning on dumping any of my own garbage here, I drove around and pulled up to a large, gray building, steam and smoke mixing into the already crepuscular air. The facility was made up of three multi-storied cubes, a series of four one-story cylindrical cooling towers and a 300-foot tall smoke stack. In the shadows of the building, the dump trucks that rumbled by looked as though they were made by Tonka.

The waiting room in the administrative building held clues to the principles of the company. A trophy case greeted visitors with nearly 30 artifacts: two keys to the city of Millbury for public service (1993, 1995), plaques for supporting various community sports teams, a thank-you note from the fire department, a statue of a cardinal from the Massachusetts Audubon Society, a plaque from the Millbury Council on Aging, numerous tablets and certificates from the Lion's Club and a 2002 Environmental Merit award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

An array of magazines and newspapers lay strewn atop the coffee table-Construction Equipment Guide, Power Engineering, Waste News, Earth Preservers and Business and Industry-demonstrating a confluence of environmental and business concerns.

Ronaldo Peña, a soft-spoken man with a dirty white hard hat (think Manny Ramirez's tar-covered batting helmet) and a neon yellow vest entered the room and greeted the group as our shift supervisor. Peña, seemingly unenthused about giving a tour, took us up through the facility with the impatience of a father trying to guide his family out of an airport. Our first stop in the waste incinerator-cum-power plant was the dumping pit-a room with the capacity to hold 6,000 tons of garbage.

"We can hold enough garbage in the pit to tide us over for weekends and holidays," Peña said. "Even when trucks stop delivering, we are burning garbage. We've got refuse burning 24/7."

Five stories above the piles of trash, a man sat in the most badass chair I have ever seen. Located inside a glass-encased deck that overlooked the pit, the chair connected to a metal track that slid forward and back like a rowing machine, allowing the occupant to move about and see every section of the room. A joystick controlling a 5,000-pound crane that plunged into the heap, each time lifting six tons of the garbage in two arms. The crane, which when open resembles a giant metallic spider, mixes the trash around before picking it up and dropping it all onto an incinerator-bound conveyer belt.

"You must be pretty damn good at winning stuffed animals," a touring student from Clark University said.

"Not yet," the operator said, swaying back and forth in the seat, his twisting wrists causing the crane to swing five feet from the glass directly in front of us and drop thousands of pounds of municipal waste. "I just started a couple of weeks ago."

We turned out of the room and walked down two flights of stairs. We soon discovered that the only smell more putrid than 1,500 tons of garbage was 1,500 tons of burning garbage. The aroma in the dimly lit hallway that surrounded the two gas-powered burners caused some members of the tour to put earplugs into their nostrils. Peña took us to a small window that looked into the belly of the incinerator. Through the thick glass I saw an expansive inferno of flaming refuse burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

This fire, fueled partially by Brandeis' own trash, is used to boil water, turning it into steam, which travels into a turbine generator. The pressure of the steam is converted to electricity, producing 46,000 megawatts of energy a day, 5,000 of which go to powering the entire plant while the other 41,000 are sold to the New England Power Company. It sells enough energy to power 41,000 homes. Metals in the garbage are sorted out by a magnet and recycled, and ash from the fire is brought to a landfill that Wheelabrator owns down the road. In the end, this process reduces the volume of incoming garbage by more than 90 percent.

As I retraced my steps through the building en route to the exit, I noticed a sign. "71 days without an accident," it read. Going a fifth of a year without an accident didn't seem so bad. Then I remembered the 5,000-pound crane and the 2,000-degree heat. I was glad to only be visiting.


The adhesive stench of compost

After tracking the disposal of the garbage, I decided to follow our waste from food consumption. Before I left for Marlborough to see what happens to Brandeis' compost waste after Wellesley Trucking picks it up behind Sherman and Usdan, I got a call from the president of the We Care environmental facility, Chris Ravenscroft. "I just want to let you know," he told me, "if you're planning to take the whole tour and then go to class, you're going to smell like compost, so save some time afterward to take a shower. Oh, and bring some boots." (He would later refer to the boots as "shit kickers.")

We Care is located on a waste management mile. It sits on the Marlborough/Sudbury town line, and neighbors the Sudbury recycle and refuse plant and the Sudbury septic treatment plant. The facility itself is engulfed in a pungent smell, much like a newly manured farm pasture on a hot day.

I arrived at the seven-acre plant on an unseasonably warm afternoon last week and was greeted by Ravenscroft, who walked me through the entire composting process. Tall and blond, Ravenscroft had the look and affability of a father from a 1950s television show. Having come from a blue-collar family and attended law school in Boston, he seemed to have the ability to work and get along with just about anyone.

Just like in the Wheelabrator facility, the We Care tour began in a room filled with garbage. It is here that Wellesley Trucking brings about 500 tons of Brandeis waste annually. The waste we send here is composed of about 50 percent biodegradable organic substances and 50 percent inorganic waste. After separating out much of the inorganic material, the composting process begins in an adjacent area of the facility known as the digesters.

"We make happen on an industrial scale what already happens in nature," Ravenscroft said, standing in front of two 185-foot-long, 12-foot-wide steel tubes, called "digesters." For three days the tubes spin the waste at one rotation per minute while gravity takes it to the end at a one-degree angle. It is in this tube that naturally occurring bacteria begin converting waste into nitrogen-rich compost, perfect for creating arable soil. "We're not unlike a beer brewery," Ravenscroft explained. "They have yeast and hops, and we have nitrogen and bacteria. It's all about maintaining temperature and keeping the right recipe."

After a three-day journey to the end of the pipe, the material is sorted through a screen to separate out any inorganic material-bottle caps, plastic containers, etc.-that is still there. After all the separations, only about 60 percent of the material is actually made into compost. What does go through finds itself in a steamy, stinky warehouse. In this building, known as a compost building, the material spends 21 days getting eaten by bacteria. To keep this room filled with enough oxygen, air is pumped in from the other sections of the building. In other words, all the stink from the garbage dumping pit and the water treatment sludge ends up in this room.

"That rotten egg smell, that's the bugs doing their job," Ravenscroft said. "We've got showers and clean clothes in the other building, but if I ever wear these boots home, that's when I catch hell."

In addition to being smelly, the reaction of the bacteria in the waste is also exothermic, meaning the piles of compost actually give off heat and steam and make the whole room feel like a pungent, dimly lit rainforest. The room's most incredible feature is that with so many piles of compost in so many different stages, I could actually see the process right before my eyes. The first piles are still full of large bits of colorful waste; by the time I walked to the last pile, fluffy, homogeneous topsoil surrounded me, and Ravenscroft invited me to grab it by the handful. Because contractors have used all of Massachusetts' natural topsoil, they now use this stuff- which is 70 to 80 percent organic-to make everything from rooftop gardens to golf courses to city parks. In other words, part of what makes golf courses so green is our discarded banana peels.

Ravenscroft said his company flourishes because of a convergence of business and environmental concerns.

"First of all, the industry is maturing and becoming more and more professional," he said. "In general, waste management used to be run by some mayor's drunk brother-in-law. Now people are spending millions and millions of dollars on this. Environmentally speaking, it does not hurt us that oil is 100 dollars a barrel. Al Gore doesn't hurt us either. People are looking at the industry in a completely different light now. They see us not only as economically practical, but as environmentally sound."

"Look," he said holding a pile of compost out with his hands, "it doesn't really even have a smell." I tried to breath in deeply, but the aroma from the rest of the room made my eyes water and my bronchi tighten.

From this room, air of staggering stench is then collected at 110,000 cubic feet per minute to go into a building filled with what Ravenscroft called "glorified woodchips." A massive pump propels the air though an "air scrubber" designed to knock down dust particles and add humidity, and then below 30,000 square feet of these wood chips before a ceiling fan finally releases the now relatively stench-free air into the world.

"The wood is specialized to be the right size, the right density, the right moisture, making it a perfect environment for the bacteria to live in," Ravenscroft said. "It's basically the forest floor on steroids." It only takes three seconds for the air to pass through the wood, but standing on top of the woodchips, they were all I could smell. Maybe I was getting used to the odor.

"You realize you are drive-through now," the facilities manager Philip McCarthy said to me as I finished my tour. I looked at him quizzically. "You smell terrible," he said. "No restaurants or banks for you after you come out of here, they won't have you. You're drive-through material now."


Making something out of nothing

My last stop was to see where all the bottles and cans from Epstein's open-topped dumpster end up: Conigliaro Recycling in Framingham. My meeting with Richard Garrison, the vice president of operations for Conigliaro, began with a lesson on arrows.

"Everyone knows that when you look at a recycling bin there are three arrows. What most people don't know, is that these arrows each mean something," Garrison said to me from behind his desk. "The first arrow stands for collection, the second arrow is for processing of material and the third arrow represents taking that material and transforming it into a new product and selling it. By the third arrow, it's been reborn. It's important to think about recycling in terms of these arrows because it forces you to think about it from start to finish. People think that all recycling happens here, but it's happening everywhere."

The second arrow most accurately describes the relationship between Brandeis and Conigliaro. Wellesley Trucking takes care of the collection, and the transformation takes place at paper mills and off sight plastic/glass/metal conversion plants. Conigliaro takes care of the middle step. Here, workers separate cardboard from other materials and bind them together, as piles of commingled materials are carted away by the truckload.

As far as Brandeis is concerned, Conigliaro essentially serves as a holding ground for recyclables, which accumulate until there is enough to ship out in bulk.

Once off-site, it's on to the third arrow: Cardboard is thrown into a huge vat, turned into oatmeal, heated up and transformed, usually into the undulating material that makes up the center of cardboard; while the plastics, glass and metals are separated from each other and turned into products ranging from polar fleece blankets to more cans.

Conigliaro does, however, have the capability to recycle more than 150 different types of materials itself and create its own products. The facility still uses one of the first and only mattress recycling centers in the country, originally called the "bedder shredder." The facility also comes equipped with glass-grinding machines to make colorful aggregates and an apparatus that takes used Styrofoam and crunches it up into packaging material named Polycorn.

We walked around the seven-acre facility, watching as workers mixed plastic with concrete to make Lego blocks of "plascrete"-a material used as retainer walls in construction-and passed by giant, colorful blocks of flattened Axe Body Spray and Old Spice cans and outdoor compartments separated into piles of steel, wood, glass, cardboard and more. Garrison talked about the growing interest in recycling.

"Anything that becomes so big so quick has danger of air coming out just as quick," he said. "Right now, more people are aware of the right thing to do, but for it to be a sustained thing it has to be more than a fad, it has to be a trend. Hopefully the result will become integrated. What I mean by this is we need to make recycling more practical and economically practical.

"The truth is, 90 percent of all garbage is technically recyclable. The only question is, is it economically feasible. In this way, recycling really has always been a business. In the public's eye, we think about recycling as a right thing to do. It's much more than that. Really, recycling is about making new products. And people that are involved in recycling have always been in business. It's great for people to be socially conscious, but in the end, it's about making commodities."



The real issue

After visiting the three places we send our waste, it took me a moment to realize that everything we send out-from Einstein coffee cups, to leftover Usdan beef stew, to Dasani bottles-is somehow recycled-whether in the form of electricity, compost or conventional recycling. Still, the fact that all of Brandeis' waste goes to some sort of recycling center is commendable is no reason for complacency. After all, 100 percent recycling does not mean zero impact on the environment. Peña, Ravenscroft and Garrison were all quick to point out that all types of recycling plants pollute-from the emissions of the buildings, to the use of transportation, to shipments of unusable material to landfills.

A study by the Technical University of Denmark looked at 55 products and compared the effects of burning, burying or recycling them. Researchers found that 80 percent of the time, recycling was the most efficient way to dispose of waste, but they cautioned that recycling is not infallible. Recycling aluminum requires 95 percent less energy than producing it from scratch, but the numbers fall to 70 percent for plastics and 40 percent for paper.

Prof. Laura Goldin (ENVS), who teaches a course titled "Greening the Ivory Tower," a student project course dedicated to the study and betterment of Brandeis' environmental impacts, said real issues of waste management go well beyond what to do with used products.

"The issue with the way we are approaching this problem is that we are only focusing on the end point, the end of the pipe," Goldin said. "Really, the way we need to think about this is to think about the creation and use of products that are disposable in the first place. We consume way too much, and we don't need to. If we are talking about ecological footprints, we are out of the scale. If everyone on earth consumed the way that the average student in the United States consumed, it would take six earths to produce enough just for the United States."

In Goldin's opinion, the solution to the world's waste problem is manifold, but begins right here at Brandeis. For the University to really deserve a better grade in terms of sustainability we need to consider the implications of the way we consume and what we consume.

"A large part of the environmental sustainability equation is our own personal consumption," she said. "A bottle of water may be handy to have, but when you weigh the impact of bottled water production on everything from shrinking clean water resources to climate change, it becomes far less 'handy.' Our consumption habits carry social justice implications as well; when many of our cheap disposable products are produced in developing countries with little or no environmental regulation by poorly paid workers under unsafe working conditions."

"The bottom line," Goldin said, "In terms of our ecological 'footprint' both as a society and as individuals, we are living unsustainably. But informed choices smarter design and production and sound regulation, along with some measure of doing with less, can make a difference."

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