By: Bob Douglas

Bob Douglas — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:53:55 +0000

I’m sorry Jena, but I do not recall having made the statement attributed to me in your response. UST works with the non-profit Eureka Recycling who also handles all the recycling for the City of St. Paul. While Eureka does not curently collect this sort of cup for composting, they are investingating doing it in the near future. When they do, we will do what we can to assist Food Service in collecting the cups for composting. There are other universities who have large composting operations but not many in urban settings. Macalester until this year composted their food waste but that plan didn’t keep up with the volume and they are now using the same food recycler that UST has used for years. As far as students not being consulted, the use of environmentally favorable cups has been a concern and advocacy of UST students for at least 15 years. While we would like to keep cups out of the waste stream and look forward to the time when that is viable, please consider in the meantime decreasing the volume of recyclables that are being thrown by the UST community into thetrash. Trash audits have shown that 40 to 50 percent of what’s in UST trash cans could be recycled in the UST recycling program. We could and should do better.if there’s a concern about not wasting money

By: Jena Root

Jena Root — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:48:58 +0000

I do not fully agree that this issue has gone unnoticed; I think the problem is that students do not know what to do about it. The University states they want to save the environment when in fact the new cups cannot be recycled here at the university. I was explained to by the sustainability committee chair the other universities have the capable facilities of properly recycling this type of material, but St. Thomas does not recycle like other universities. “We run on our own schedule” is what I was told. And yes each cup may cost a few cents but think of the thousands of cups that we use every day, and they are all still ending up in the garbage. Therefore I believe that our university is increasing the cost of the cups but not decreasing the waste. The NatureWorks cups are indeed plastic 7 which is often the container of choice for reusable plastic water bottles, but we are not using them for re-use but one time uses. St. Thomas has been pushing environmentally friendly ideas on me heavily for years and wasting my money without even consulting the students being affected.

Comments on: Plastic replaces foam cups in all campus eateries

By: Bob Douglas

By: Jena Root