The most beautiful thing imaginable happened this school year. After four long years of strife - relying on dorm orders, doordash, and that one friend with a car - it finally happened. A boba shop on campus. And not random coffee places serving boba either! An honest to gosh real-life boba shop - Chun Yang Tea. To say the least, this boba fiend was thrilled and has been a regular for months. And yet, there is this one nagging thing. The new boba shop uses plastic containers.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been ordering boba for years - plastic cups, plastic wrapper tops, plastic straws and all. It usually doesn’t bother me, but when I order from this shop on campus, which I do quite frequently, I walk away a little disappointed. So why do these plastic cups, the same ones almost every boba shop uses, feel different?
I think it is the contrast. Last year, the Huang building landfill bins were fairly empty. Now, the one or two pho bowls peeking out of the compost are dwarfed by the neighboring, landfill-bound, boba mess.
It is actually quite an uncommon sight on our campus. In 2019, a study of Stanford’s waste found that 17% of all of campus waste production ends up in landfills compared to the 2018 EPA estimate of around 50% over the US as a whole. So Stanford is ahead in terms of landfill diversion, but there is still a lot more work. It's worth repeating that landfills pose a serious problem. The EPA estimates that landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States. Methane, when compared to carbon pound for pound, is 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas. Beyond climate change, landfills are dangerous unto themselves as a source of pollutants. They are toxic, horrible to smell, and unsightly - and this burden is predominantly born by communities of color. According to the Commission for Racial Justice, the race of the surrounding community is the best predictor of the locations of hazardous waste facilities, even as compared to income.
This issue of pollution is likely to only get worse from here on out. In 2020, the Waste Business Journal predicted that the US had about 18 years left of suitable landfill capacity. We are literally running out of space to put our trash and we have to address the issue. Recycling and Composting are the two biggest alternatives once waste has already been produced. Compost decomposes in the presence of oxygen, unlike waste buried in landfills, so it doesn’t produce methane. Even more impressively, compost also locks up additional carbon in the soil.
Recycling, on the other hand, prevents the need for new materials by repurposing old ones. This reduces the greenhouse gas emissions from actions like mining. It also keeps useful materials and land from being wasted on landfills.
So what is Stanford doing to help us reduce our collective landfill impact? Right now Stanford has set a self-imposed goal of Zero Waste, defined as “90% diversion from landfill or higher, by 2030." To learn a little more about what ‘zero waste’ looks like in practice, and how my boba trash angst fits into it all, I spoke to Julie Muir, the Associate Director of Zero Waste Systems at Stanford. She confirmed the zero waste goal includes the “entire campus - includes vendors, includes anyone, any waste that is generated on this campus.” It doesn’t matter how waste gets to campus. If it is thrown out on campus - it counts. That includes students’ Trader Joe's bags, packaging from Amazon boxes, dining hall scraps, and of course, boba cups.
But to be clear, Stanford doesn’t own any of the businesses on campus. Coupa, Starbucks, Subway, and Chun Yang Tea are all independently run and have contracts to be allowed to operate on the Stanford campus. Vendors pay Stanford to be on campus and students pay vendors for goods and services. Given this context, Julie explains “it's always going to come back to a partnership. We don't expect any business to operate on campus at a loss, right? [...] They are legitimate businesses, they have a contract, they need to make money, and all of those things.”
So how does Stanford plan on getting vendors on board with Zero Waste goals? Stanford can advocate that vendors change policies, or include requirements for reusable or compostable materials in the original contracts. But it isn’t always smooth sailing. Not all vendor contracts, including brand new ones, include clauses about waste management. Julie noted in our conversation that she often has to advocate for waste management to people within Stanford. But even when waste management is clear in a contract, whether or not it actually happens is a different story.
In Julie’s words, “a lot of this work is lining up cats.” She explained it like this: “I can get all the cafes to use the right cup, you know, and I've gone through extra efforts to get them to do that. And then there's someone who shows up with a new cup, and I'm like, I thought I had the cups figured out, people!” So what happened? Sometimes a supplier runs out of the compostable cups and substitutes them with non-compostable cups without consulting the vendor. Maybe the price of cups changed and the business went for a cheaper option. Or, a new manager took over and doesn’t know about the contract. Although the department just hired a new building inspector to check on issues like this, because landfill materials are the default, if any little piece in the chain breaks, the outcome is greater waste - not just that produced by the vendor, but also any bins contaminated in the confusion.
If it isn't clear at this point, zero waste is an ambitious goal. But more than that, it is a process, not a fixed achievement. Julie describes that “We are laying our pipes, [...] we're going through every building changing the system [...] But I got 300 buildings. What happened to the building I did 40 [buildings] ago, right? Are the bins still there? Are the signs still up? I have no idea, I don't have time to go back and check. I’ve got more buildings to go.” Unlike water or electricity which are pumped into campus in a measured way, waste flows through people. Lots and lots of people. Waste management must be a goal sustained through each new vendor, each new supplier, and each new class of students and employees. Therefore, lasting change can’t be achieved through large “remodelling” projects. Instead, we need responsive protocols for increasing waste compliance.
So are we going to make it? Who can say. But we definitely won’t get there without student buy-in. Dining halls and student housing are the largest sources of landfill waste on campus and there are some easy solutions within reach. When students lean towards alternatives to purchasing - mending clothes, using reusable alternatives, and avoiding food waste, it greatly reduces the campus impact.
Another huge factor is education about trash. The same 2019 study of Stanford’s waste found that more than 75% of all the waste in the landfill bins could have been recycled or composted. The goal with zero waste is to send as little as possible to the landfill. There are two ways to do that: by producing less waste generally or sending waste to be composted and recycled. So the easiest fix to reducing the amount in the landfill bins right now is by putting it in the right bin. Making it to zero waste relies on people sorting accurately.
75% incorrect isn’t surprising given how complicated sorting can be. When I spoke to students around Forbes Cafe, Coupa, and Tresidder, most were surprised about their trash. One student remarked “I actually didn’t know that Coupa had compostable ‘plastic’ cups like the dining hall does. Because there are so many types of compostable cups on campus I didn’t notice.” Knowing what goes where is hard enough already, even with labels. We don’t need products which make things even more difficult. Take boba. The thin, sealed plastic lid? That’s too thin and degraded to be recycled, so landfill. But the cup? It is thick enough to be recycled if you can peel off the lid. And the straw is a puzzle in itself. It could be compostable, but more often than not it is landfill plastic.
There are better solutions. Urban Ritual in San Mateo sells boba in entirely compostable cups, as does Boba Guys in Palo Alto. But until Stanford and vendors on campus make the switch, sorting is the best alternative we have. It takes practice, and it requires people to care about their waste. But we should care about our waste because it is ours. We used it, benefited from it and when we throw it away, we are often the last humans to touch it before it ends up spending centuries buried in a landfill or adrift in the ocean.
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Aisling Murran has a deep and unwavering interest in life, from the inner workings of people’s minds to the smallest bugs and critters. In pursuit of this love, she has worked as a biological scientist, a performing artist, and multimedia storyteller. The whole process of science; research, application and knowledge sharing, is what drew Aisling to the Environmental Communications Master’s degree and will continue to motivate her work after graduation.
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