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Sustainability Week
Reduce, reuse, recycle. You’ve heard it a thousand times, but what does it mean besides getting your plastic bottle into your blue recycling cart? The 3 Rs are meant to be used as a hierarchy, starting with reduce (cutting down on waste from the source), then reuse (using items for as long or as many different uses as possible) and finally recycling through responsible processors.
It’s Waste Reduction Week in Canada and we’re celebrating at Bow Valley College by focusing on the actions we can take to reduce waste on campus. This extends beyond good recycling practices into reusing, repairing, sustainable purchasing, and getting creative with the materials we have on campus to keep them out of the landfill.
Bow Valley College has established a target to send at least 90% of the waste materials created on campus to our blue bin recycling, green bin compost, or specialty recycling programs for electronics, pens, and shredded paper. We’re worked to reach this target in a number of ways:
- We have an extensive recycling and composting system that can capture specialty items like fabrics, electronics, pens and batteries, and gloves from the nursing programs.
- We have an amazing team of waste sorters who sort through the recycling at the end of each day to ensure items have been sorted into the correct streams.
- We get creative with our used items. For instance, the College has donated 20 old patient simulators from our nursing labs to ScreamFest Calgary so they can be used as props in their haunted house decorations.
If you’re interested in learning more about waste reduction on campus, join the Sustainability Committee for a free zero-waste lunch on Thursday, October 19th. RSVP here. A BVC account is required to register.
To learn more about BVC’s waste reduction efforts, please see our annual Sustainability Report.
Questions or comments? Please contact the Sustainability Office at sustainability@bowvalleycollege.ca
