Managing Waste and Creating a Culture of Sustainability

Students arriving for their first year at college can expect to gain plenty of new knowledge. Something they may not be expecting to learn? How to recycle.

This education — or rather, re-education — is the concern of Tristan Davis ’25, the Grinnell College compost and recycling sustainability coordinator. “There is really simple knowledge that changes our ability to manage waste sustainability, but it’s different from the frameworks and regulations that students grew up with,” says Davis.

Davis himself grew up in the San Francisco area. He’s witnessed how the transient nature of campus communities makes waste management in such places a unique challenge. Students come to college temporarily after spending much of their lives elsewhere, where they became accustomed to certain recycling and waste protocols and services that may be different from those they encounter on campus. For example, Davis explains, most students grew up recycling glass in single-stream recycling, yet that isn’t possible in the city of Grinnell. Bags of single-stream recycling are “contaminated” by the presence of just one piece of glass, he says. If students don’t know the guidelines for what constitutes recycling, entire bags of recyclables must be disposed of as waste.

Davis has served as the compost and recycling sustainability coordinator since his first semester. During a pre-college gap year, he explored composting and was drawn to the practice’s potential as a waste management strategy at Grinnell. But beyond his interest in alternative endpoints for waste, Davis is driven by a great sense of urgency when it comes to concerted sustainability efforts. Applying to the sustainability coordinator position was, for him, an obvious decision.

Davis is one of several paid student sustainability coordinators supervised by Chris Bair ’96, the College’s environmental and safety coordinator. “Ideally, we’d have one student coordinator to cover each sustainability category — energy, compost/recycling, water, land stewards, communication, and the leaders of the Student Environmental Committee,” Bair says. The scope of the student coordinators’ work is wide, he says, as they pursue self-directed projects alongside projects dictated by Bair or the sustainability committee.

Davis oversees the management of campus waste, with the goal of minimizing waste that goes to landfills and maximizing what is diverted through composting and recycling. One of his primary focuses has been developing the infrastructure and education for a strong compost system at the College. Last year, Davis made significant progress toward this end by successfully converting all disposable products in the Spencer Grill to compostable alternatives. Students could put plates, napkins, cutlery, food scraps, and more in compost bins alongside recycling and waste bins. Unfortunately, the company contracted to compost that waste shut down this year, and Davis has pivoted to lead the search for alternative industrial compost sites.

Davis also oversees the recovery of food waste from the College’s Marketplace dining hall, managing its composting and distribution to local farmers who will use it. As the amount of waste coming from student dining has grown, Davis explains, the College has acquired a compacter to manage its composting more efficiently.

Along with his involvement in waste management, Davis says that one of his primary responsibilities is to increase the visibility of sustainability initiatives and promote a culture of sustainability on campus. Much of the work done by sustainability coordinators goes on behind the scenes of campus life, something that Davis sees as a barrier to collective responsibility on campus.

“Unfortunately,” Davis says, “I don’t think many people know about us or the work we do. The work of sustainability is so aligned with the culture of Grinnellians, yet we fall short as a campus body in many ways.” A sense of urgency and a fear of an uncertain future drive his efforts; yet, Davis can’t help but wonder if he’s alone in that feeling.

In his remaining time as a student, Davis hopes to see the emergence of a greater campus-wide culture of sustainability — an ethos that begins the moment students arrive for New Student Orientation.

“Grinnellians have a demonstrated capacity for collective action,” Davis says. “I want to see that show up in our approach to waste on campus.”