Purchasing & Waste

With a campus population that considerably increases every year, wasteful consumption of resources has never been a greater concern then now. Every day food, water, and academic supplies are needlessly thrown away for the landfills by a community ill-informed of conservation endeavors. This brings substantial costs to the campus for removal of so much waste. In order to change this we must make efforts more accessible to the campus population.

The Purchasing & Waste Committee is charged with helping reduce waste disposal and identifying what types of products used on campus can be adapted to sustainable bounds. The increased availability of an extensive recycling program has been a strong step in the right direction and a foundation for building more productive waste management techniques. In addition to recycling food waste into productive means, we're looking into converting all our bottled water into a more sustainable system of dispersion.

Careless usage of paper and office supplies is a big issue, and top priorities are to increase recycled paper use and to develop methods of print reduction in campus labs and offices. We are also developing an improved "Green" Purchasing Guide for informing faculty, staff, students, and administration of ways to make their spending more ecologically sound. We want every member of the UMass Dartmouth community to have a "green" point-of-view engraved into their thought processes every time they deal with trash, type out an assignment, or go shopping.