Every year, Emory Recycles and the Office of Sustainability Initiatives hold a competition encouraging recycling efforts around campus. This contest, held throughout November, works to unite the actions of faculty, students and staff in order to demonstrate the largest comparative difference between buildings in recycling from the corresponding month of the previous year.
The Office of Sustainability Initiatives (OSI) invited Emory students, faculty and staff to submit a two-minute video that creatively and effectively educated about the importance of landfill waste diversion, including the social and environmental impacts of landfills.
When Emory crafted its current Sustainability Vision, one of the University’s most transformative — and ambitious — goals was a commitment to divert 95 percent of campus waste from municipal landfills by 2025, effectively a zero-waste policy.
Emory’s 2025 Sustainability Vision identified four main action arenas, including utilizing Emory’s landscape, buildings, and operations to model best practices. This past year, campus departments made important strides toward realizing Emory’s Sustainability Vision goals
During the 2016 fiscal year, Emory successfully diverted 55 percent of waste materials from the landfill. With an almost 5 percent increase from 2015, the University is making progress toward achieving the goal of 95 percent diversion by 2025.
