See why this building won Harvard's first LEED Platinum certification:
Link >>
OFS unveiled the new Reuselist Website, a new supply swap resource for Harvard staff and faculty. Register and post unwanted surplus and make connections with donors of items you may want, right on campus!
FREE SURPLUS FURNITURE and other items are available at our Recycling and Surplus Center in Allston every Thursday! If donating furniture, please instruct your movers to contact us 24 hours before delivery so that we can receive and display everything safely. We can take material only from Harvard buildings which use our waste and recycling services, and we can never receive any trash or hazardous waste. Please keep in mind that parking space limitations force us to be STRICT ABOUT PARKING RULES. Please respect our neighbors' need to maintain safe traffic flow around the Recycling and Surplus Center. When here for Thursday's Surplus Distribution, follow the parking monitor's direction and park only in designated areas. You may also park in the free spaces in the streets adjacent to the property. If you are interested in seeing any of the items now available, come to our Recycling and Surplus Center at 175 North Harvard Street in Allston any Thursday except Thanksgiving from 11 to 2 PM. A street map showing our location is here. Everything is free, first-come, first-served and open to everyone.
...and ballasts and batteries sitting in mechanical rooms and custodial closets all over the University. We are ready, willing and able to pick up your Universal Waste for proper recycling this month! If you need boxes, labels, drums, or buckets, we got 'em. Please make sure your Universal Waste is stored in labeled, dated, closed containers, and set out for pickup in securely taped boxes. Recycling lamps, ballasts and batteries keeps nasty toxins like mercury, PCB's, lead, zinc, cadmium and lithium out of ground water and incinerator exhaust. Also, recycling Universal Waste is the law! You don't want your building to be out of compliance with Environmental Health and Safety, do you? If you need to train your custodians or property maintenance personnel in how to comply with Universal Waste laws, please contact Lance Schumacher.
"The surprising conclusion of both reports... is that manufactured products--not buildings, heating and cooling, passenger car use or food--make the largest contribution to greenhouse gas emissions." Bill Sheehan, Product Policy Institute, quoted in "Waste & Recycling News," 9-28-09
Office for Sustainability, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Harvard FMO Recycling teamed up to put on a FABULOUS FREECYCLE EVENT on 9-15-09 at the Science Center lawn.
SHOPPERS EXCHANGED AN ESTIMATED FIVE CUBIC YARDS of goods, rescuing 500 pounds of reusables, including folders, 3-ring binders, bookends, printer toner cartridges, post-it pads, pencils and paper; even computers, printers, swivel chairs, and other large items. Thanks to Dara Olmsted from FAS Green Program, plus FAS Green Program Reps Tim Lehmann, Lila Strominger, and Dave Boudreau, and Green Teamers Sarah Gordon (FAS Finance) and Isaure Mignotte (Literature), for publicizing, staffing, and cleaning up this event. Heather McMullen, Larry Black and Scott McDonald also donated 3 cubic yards of office supplies from the Harvard Kennedy School to the event. Leftover items were donated to Harvard Recycling’s Surplus Distribution. If your department would like to host a FreeCycle, or even set up a permanent “Take it or Leave It” station, please contact us. We’ll give you a “seed stock” of goods donated by someone else, and maybe even some display racks, to get you started! Please let us know. All we need is a volunteer and 3 square feet of display space.
Harvard Recycling joined Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in the Official re-opening of Casella Recycling's Charlestown Facility in September. A $6.5 million renovation has allowed Casella Charlestown to become the third largest materials recovery facility in the nation. State-of-the-art spectrometers, star gears and eddy current generators enable Casella to produce clean bales of 16 different commodities. Harvard Recycling's Rob Gogan spoke at the ceremony, crediting Casella's "Zero Sort" single-stream recycling specifications with an increase in our campus recycling rates from 44% to 55% in two years.
Come to TOUR CASELLA'S NEW PLANT in Charlestown on Wednesday, 11 November 2009! A bus will take us from Harvard Yard to Charlestown, leaving at 9 AM and returning by 12 noon. The facility will be in full operation, so we'll see recyclables moving through the facility's many mechanical, optical and manual sorting systems. There is room on the bus for the first 30 responding students, staff or faculty, so email us right away if interested.
Harvard is invited to the US EPA's RecycleMania "GAME DAY CHALLENGE!" This is a pilot football game recycling competition between eight campuses. Harvard Athletics, the Office for Sustainability, and Facilities Maintenance Operations will team up to pull more cardboard, bottles, cans and programs out of the trash. We are honored to accept the invitation! While we are targeting THE PRINCETON GAME, 10-24-09 as our special time to shine, we have aggressively promoted recycling at all our home games this year, led by Athletics Resource Efficiency Program REP Alyssa Devlin, REP Coordinator Brandon Geller and a team of volunteers with snappy yellow “Harvard Recycles” vests! In the meantime, when you go out to cheer the Harvard Crimson at the stadium, look for recycling receptacles and use them!
This September, Harvard generated 588 tons of trash, our least on record. By comparison, in September 2004, we discarded 831 tons of trash. The 29% reduction is particularly remarkable because this is the first year all branches of the University have been in full operation throughout September. Recycling also declined over last year, but we are still diverting well over 53% of our refuse for recycling or composting. Since July 2008, our trash has declined at a rate that, should it continue, will bring us to Zero Waste sometime late in calendar year 2019! LET’S DO IT! We think we can, and we know we can, thanks to you all, the diligent recyclers, reusers, composters, and smart buyers of Harvard.
Harvard hosts a tour for the NATIONAL RECYCLING & ZERO WASTE CONFERENCE 21 October 2009: Attendees at the Grassroots Recycling Network’s “Building Zero Waste Communities” came to Devens, MA from all over the nation. On Tuesday, Harvard Recycling appeared on a Collegiate Recycling Panel; Wednesday, conferees came for a tour of Harvard’s Materials Management practices, including charitable re-use at 175 N. Harvard Street; recycling at the Divinity School; composting at Molecular and Chemical Biology; sustainability practices at Dining Services’ Annenberg Hall, and on-site vehicle transfer techniques from Harvard’s mini-packers to Allied and Save That Stuff’s rear-load packers. Read more about the conference here.
Read in the New York Times about FMO's Organic maintenance program, where Harvard organic refuse comes back to nourish Harvard’s greenscapes. Quotes from FMO Landscape Services Manager Wayne Carbone and Horticulturist Kieran Clyne! Longer grass roots, healthier lawns, thriving orchards:
...and on New Hampshire Public Radio!
The EPA confirms in a report released this September that products and packaging generate 42% of 2006 US greenhouse gasses. So waste reduction, composting and recycling are some of the most direct ways average businesses, institutions and households can cut their carbon footprint. See "Opportunities to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Materials and Land Management Practices" published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. This figure includes GHG's generated in food production and processing, but it does not include GHG's generated by other countries in growing and manufacturing foods and products exported to the US. Read more here.
Read the latest about MIT's TrashTrack project, where the removal chain of individual pieces of trash or recyclables is monitored.
Grist's UMBRA FISKE shows how to green your campus, using carbon-neutral College of the Atlantic as a model. See the 2-minute video here.
This summer, the U. S. Army drove an M-1 Abrams tank weighing more than 140,000 pounds across a newly constructed span near Ft. Bragg NC. The bridge is 35 ft. long and is made from 170,000 pounds of recycled gallon milk jugs--about 1.1 million containers. A wood bridge would weigh 3 times as much, require more fasteners and take 3 times as long to build. This bridge is able to support heavy loads with little or no maintenance for at least 50 years. (from July 20, 2009 Waste & Recycling News).
For information concerning Recycling and Solid Waste Removal, contact Rob Gogan, Supervisor of Recycling and Solid Waste Removal at 617-495-3042, or email rob_gogan at harvard dot edu
