By: The Brock News
Hot tip: There’s a new home for empty coffee cups on campus.
Instead of tossing cups in the garbage, hot beverage drinkers are encouraged to place them in new disposal units set up in convenient locations across the University.
Made possible by generous funding provided by the Brock University Students’ Union’s green levy, the initiative supports Brock’s ongoing waste diversion efforts.
The specialized bins are designed to make it easy to properly dispose of coffee cups. Each unit includes a central compartment for lidless, empty cups along with two side chutes — one for any remaining liquid and another for the recyclable plastic lids.
Brock’s annual waste audits have revealed coffee cups often end up in landfills or incorrectly placed in blue bin recycling streams. While the cups cannot be diverted from landfills through conventional recycling, they can follow the same route as organic waste.
Davidson Environmental collects the cups as part of Brock’s organic waste stream, transporting them to their contamination separator that removes inorganic waste, such as plastic linings, from the organic material.
This process results in a nutrient-rich slurry that is then delivered to another facility, Escarpment Renewables. Through anaerobic digestion, the organic material breaks down into nutrient fertilizer, which is applied to local crops. The process also results in renewable energy, with excess natural gas produced during composition burned through a generator to produce electricity.
Questions related to the coffee cup disposal initiative can be emailed to [email protected]
