Deep Into It

Meredith Atwood ‘09 Hates garbage. So who doesn’t right? Well, she hates it so much that she doesn’t even like to see it get thrown away, especially if there’s another use for it. No doubt it comes from growing up in a family who recycles everything they can, even their food waste, which they pile in a compost bin outside their Cape Cod home.
Upon coming to Denison, it didn’t take long for the environmental studies major to wonder how much food is wasted in Denison’s dining halls each day. The answer: about 100 gallons, 65 of which were preconsumer (anything not left on her fellow diners’ dirty dishes). So she spent the summer after her first year carefully analyzing various composting programs and submitted a comprehensive proposal to Denison’s facilities management that fall. College officials then conducted their own study, basing much of it on Atwood’s recommendations, and by the following summer bought the equipment needed to collect and blend preconsumer food waste with leaves, grass, and twigs gathered from campus grounds. It’s all now being composted in a heap beside facilities headquarters on Pearl Street, and will produce an estimated 43,000 pounds of fertilizer annually—almost twice as much as the campus actually needs.
“It just seemed like a no-brainer to me and an issue worth fighting for,” says Atwood. But her fight hasn’t stopped there. She’s a founding member of the Green Team, a two-year-old student organization that’s been a driving force behind the college’s efforts to increase recycling (more multi-purpose bins in more places), reduce water use (they sponsored a contest between residence halls to see who could save more; Prospect House came in first and Shorney Hall second), and adopt a comprehensive set of environmental policies (the college recently formed a task force to investigate how to implement their recommendations). To Atwood and her friends, anything that isn’t environmentally responsible is, well, garbage.