In 2006, UF made a bold sustainability plan to dramatically reduce its waste output. It was supposed to make UF almost waste-free by this year.
The results are in: According to Tuesday’s front-page story in the Alligator, UF flopped pretty hard.
The 10-year plan was supposed to bring us to a zero-percent waste goal. It sounds absurd, if not impossible, but the meaning of “zero waste” is actually pretty nuanced. Rather than produce no waste whatsoever — which would be impossible — the zero-waste goal relies on a different definition.
To qualify, UF would have to compost, reuse or recycle at least 90 percent of the waste it produces. The 10 percent thing makes the idea a bit more realistic, as there are a bunch of things that simply have to be thrown away — Shands can’t exactly reuse its hypodermic needles.
Still, 90 percent is a steep statistic. It’s certainly understandable if we didn’t reach a point quite that high.
Yeah, but we weren’t even close to being close. Last year, the amount of our waste that wasn’t carted to a landfill was only 45.3 percent. UF got barely more than halfway — and by barely, we mean 0.3 percent more than … you probably did the math in your head by now. We’ll carry on from here.
We could use this space to rail against the administration, the Office of Sustainability and, hell, the Student Body in retaliation for this shortcoming. But we won’t — mostly because that would be dumb, and we aren’t that mean.
Besides, doing so would be a slap in the face to everyone who worked so hard to get us to 45.3 percent in the first place.
It would also ignore how amazing it is that we got there. Objectively, 90 percent is an incredibly ambitious goal — to attempt that in 10 years is honestly kind of crazy. Getting close to that will require a change in mindset for everyone in the UF community, which is pretty hard considering it gets thousands of new people every year.
Yeah, UF sent 1,500 more tons to rot in a landfill than it recycled or composted. But we’re choosing to see this whole deal as a positive sign: UF is committed to ambitious plans for sustainability and environmental welfare.
It appears to have paid off: compared to the other university sustainability programs mentioned in the story, we’ve done pretty well for ourselves. The Ohio State and University of Colorado Boulder each pulled 34.4 and 42.7 percent, respectively.
In other words: yes, UF barely accomplished half of its stated goal. But in the context of that goal being pretty much impossible, we think this is something the UF community can be proud of.
And, now that we’ve got a foot in the door, the UF community will have an advantage in the coming years. We’ve gotten pretty far since 2006; let’s see where the next decade takes us.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 4/15/2015]
