I Picked Through Northeastern’s Trash for a Month. Here’s What I Learned.

By Ryan Treible with Sustainability

On a cold Friday morning in March, I found myself hunched over a tarp in the trash room of West Village H, sorting through damp paper towels, plastic bottles, and someone’s half-eaten sandwich. I was there alongside Northeastern’s Materials and Recycling team, part of an effort led by Director Sue Higgins. Together, we dug through hundreds of pounds of trash, recycling, and compost; part of a broader pilot project to understand how students are managing their waste and how they might do it better.

Since the start of the semester, West Village H has served as a testing ground for residential composting, with redesigned signage and direct student outreach. As part of that process, waste was collected from each building’s trash rooms, sorted by hand, and weighed. In these waste audits, we tracked contamination in recycling bins, measured how much compostable material was ending up in the trash, and looked for signs of lasting behavior change. 

There were some clear wins. In West H, the recycling contamination rate dropped from 6.85 percent in the fall to just 3.3 percent after the program launched. Across the trash audits, the percentage of recyclable or compostable materials in the trash—what we called “divertibles”—fell” from 66.7 percent to 56.4 percent on average. Of that total, roughly one-third was recyclable material; the rest was food waste that could have been composted. 

Benedikt Winkler, Vice President of Operational Affairs for the Student Government Association, first proposed the idea of signage reform as a first-year student. After connecting with Higgins, the project evolved into a broader effort to rework how waste is handled in student housing. “We were also going to look at some frequent items that are being placed in the wrong bins and examine how we can change those student habits…using pictures and text,” he said. 

To test these updates, the team introduced the redesigned signage in trash rooms and held in-person tabling sessions to reinforce the message. The spring audits helped see the results of those design changes in real time.  

However, while those early weeks showed significant progress being made, as the weeks passed, those early gains began to fade. The signage was overlooked, and old habits returned, showing that one round of outreach wasn’t enough. 

Casella Waste Systems, Northeastern’s recycling and composting provider, has also been closely involved in this work. On May 28, I joined a group from Northeastern to tour Casella’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF)  in Charlestown, the largest of its kind on the East Coast, and the very place where all of our campus recycling is sent. Seeing the scale of the operation firsthand was a reminder that everything we sort on campus doesn’t just disappear; it goes somewhere, gets processed, and is reused. The work we do on campus matters. It truly has an impact.

The glass from your bottles is crushed and used in roads and parking lots. Plastics are sorted, shredded, and molded into new packaging, furniture, and building materials. Paper and cardboard are pulped and reused in products ranging from cereal boxes to insulation. The impact is real, but only if what we send is clean, dry, and properly sorted. 

Compost, meanwhile, is processed separately at a Charlestown facility and then converted into a bio-slurry that’s sent to Greater Lawrence for anaerobic digestion, where it helps power the local wastewater treatment plant. 

“Really, if you’re gonna bring attention to anything, it’s the amount of food waste that is ending up in the trash,” said Tom Cue, Casella’s resource manager assigned to Northeastern. 

There are a growing number of compost bins located outside residence halls, yet the amount of food waste still showing up in trash audits suggests many students aren’t taking advantage of them. Cue emphasized that infrastructure alone isn’t enough; students need to understand what goes where and why it matters. 

Higgins, who helped oversee the project, echoed the need for sustained outreach. “This was a fascinating and eye-opening experience for us,” she said. “And we’re really looking forward to working with SGA and other sustainability-focused student groups to make sure that we capitalize on making productive changes moving forward.” 

The pilot may have been limited to two buildings, but the lessons apply everywhere. And if there’s one takeaway, it’s that waste sorting only works if students know how. 

So, here’s your cheat sheet: coffee cups? Trash. The lids? Recyclable. Pizza boxes? If it’s clean cardboard, recycle it; just remove the plastic liner inside. Food scraps? Compost, always. If you’re tossing a yogurt container, rinse it first, or at the very least don’t leave it half-full. And never put plastic bags in the recycling. Ever. 

Because here’s the truth: if recyclables end up in the trash, they’re treated as trash. Northeastern doesn’t have people regularly digging through garbage bags to correct those mistakes. It’s on students to sort it right the first time. Mother Earth is already tired; don’t make her sort your garbage, too.. 

Written by Ryan Treible, June 23rd, 2025