Waste Audits

Waste audits are when a group of students (often those involved in the Office of Sustainability, the club Students for Sustainability, or the environmental studies major) measures how much stuff is thrown away in the wrong bin. Then they use this information to inform their efforts to get people to stop throwing plastic in the compost and whatnot. Will they one day succeed? Who knows? Maybe some future reader knows. Maybe it happened. Update the page if that's you.

At Knox College, as of 2026, the stuff that our wasteful student body throw away is divided into what's called the 3-way waste system. The three ways that the waste can go are compost, recycling, and landfill. The compost bins are by far the grossest one, since it's full of food that has to sit around for days before being brought to the industrial composting site, Better Earth Composting Co, in Peoria, Illinois. While it sits around in the green bins by the Seymour Loading Dock, it gets full of maggots and wasps, and creates a smell bad enough to overcome the aroma of the nearest sugar vat. (At the same time, I gotta say, some of the cookies they throw away in there still look really tasty.)

Historical waste audits: Wednesday, November 11, 2026. This time we didn't find any bottles full of pee.

Anyway. A lot of students throw things into the wrong bin and this is the bane of your existence if you end up with the job of sorting through the maggotful composts to take out Nutella containers and Silk milk cartons before Better Earth Compost Co gets mad at us and charges fines for sending them a bunch of stuff that can't get composted.

Common mistakes Receipts from the Gizmo in the compost Plastic straws in the recycling All kinds of plastic stuff in the compost Bottles full of pee in the recycling!