Augsburg Residence Halls COMPost COMPetition 2016
On Nov 7th – 18th, each of the halls competed against the other communities within their hall to have the floor with the most non-food compostables. The grand prize of a Pizza Luce party was awarded to the floors in each individual hall that had the highest weight of compost per week. In addition to making bulletin boards with visual representations of what non-food items could be composted, RAs were also encouraged to reach out to their residents in creative ways to boost participation. Flyers taped to doors, face to face connections, and emails with residents helped bring the total weight of composted non-food items to 128.5lbs!
Residence Life has an annual Safety and Sustainability project that they work towards every year. As the Environmental Stewardship Committee prepares by encouraging composting, we are working towards our sustainability goals for our residents. Originally we did not have a specific goal weight, because we did not know what was attainable. However, we felt that the foremost goal was to first educate residents about what non-food items could and should be composted.
Altogether the final weights of this two week competition showed a total 128.5 pounds of non-food items! These numbers are very exciting for future programs. If we were able to compost 64.25 pounds of non-food items per week for the 16 week academic semester – we would be preventing 1,028 pounds of waste from going to the landfill! If this were extended for the full academic year – we would be preventing 1.028 tons of waste from going to the landfills!!!
The final weights and winners per hall can be seen below:
| Urness | 31.6 lbs | 9th floor RA Samantha | 10 lbs |
| Mortensen | 45.8 lbs | 12th floor RA Ben | 13.9 lbs |
| Anderson | 31.6 lbs | 2nd floor house and apartments RA Sam | 16.3 lbs |
| Luther | 19.5 lbs | 1st floor RA Erika | 10 lbs |
| Total | 128.5 pounds |
