Earth Day This Wednesday the 22nd!

This Wednesday, April 22 is this year’s Earth day! To get Williston in the sustainable spirit we are planning a hike, showed the Lorax this past Sunday, and will be encouraging students to wear green on Earth day. We are also hoping to give students a way to show off their sustainable accomplishments with the hashtag #willyearthday2015. If you and your friends recycle, pick up trash or do anything else that is sustainable (like using the new water bottle filling stations on campus) you can use the hashtag and tweet it at iWilliston!

Earth Day falls on April 22 every year, and is widely considered the anniversary of the beginning of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Last year for Earth Day we had also had a hike up Mt. Tom, and did some work in the garden, let’s make this year’s Earth Day even better!

Hope you all stay green (and blue) on Earth Day!

Alex Fay

Ort Report: Week 2

This last Thursday, the 9th, we had collected and weighed our second Ort report, aside from the baseline in February. We collected 115 pounds of food waste, compared to our baseline which weighed in at around 76.5 pounds. It was also more waste than the previous week, which totaled in at 102 pounds.

Let’s try harder to cut down on leaving excess scraps by thinking about how much food we want and are able to eat. Being trayless in the dining hall helps reduce the amount of food students waste, and we aim to meet our goal to have under 50 pounds of waste. This amount was the minimum wasted from 2014, so we need to improve our habits and try again this week.

An Ort Report will be taken this Thursday, so keep your eyes peeled, and stay green!

Ort Report: Week 1

This past Thursday April 2nd, marks the first Ort Report of this trimester, after we weighed and recorded the baseline in February. Many students enthusiastically embraced the Ort report, and they proudly boasted their lack of food waste. Great job guys! This week however we weighed and recorded seven full five-gallon buckets of food waste, totaling about 102 pounds of waste total. This waste was about 25.5 pounds above our baseline. Some of the extra weight may be due to the large amount of inedible corn cobs that were left over from lunch, but we still have room for improvement.

Now that the first Ort Report of the trimester is complete, we hope that students will actively think about food waste on their mind as the weeks continue. We aim to beat our minimum waste from last year of 50 pounds. Let’s make this week’s Ort Report an anomaly and start a downward trend of food waste as the trimester continues.

Keep an eye open for the Ort report and help do your part to keep our world Green and Blue!