THE PROCESS
For the STARS Waste credits OP-18 through OP-20, the process was fairly straightforward for Erin and me. I was not expecting this process to go so smoothly, which is a weird idea to reflect on. It seemed like other student’s processes were more like what I expected ours to be: communicating only by email and waiting for responses. I even know some students who waited and never received responses from the people they emailed. Thankfully, we were able to contact all the people we needed to connect with, and in a timely manner so that we were all able to meet in person. (However, it definitely helped that we were meeting with Alethea and her boss, Ronnie Souza, who’s office was in the same building.)
I think the most difficult part of this process was getting started. This included reading the STARS Technical Manual, which included the questions and what we needed to know about our credits. The Technical Manual had a lot of information in one place, so it was necessary to weed through this new information to find what we actually needed to know. The information that we did end up using were things like the standards and terms that AASHE uses. The Technical Manual also included the equations that were used to assign points to an institution for each credit. I thought this was important information, but after completing the credits, I didn’t think that these equations were important to know or memorize.
I am grateful that both Alethea and Ronnie were able to meet in person because getting all of the necessary information for this report would be very hard to do over email. Even creating concise draft emails for both Alethea and Ronnie proved to be harder than we thought. For projects like this one, I think the response time of the people you are reaching out to can seriously affect your timeline. I think it was beneficial that Erin and I reached out to Alethea and Ronnie soon, giving us more time and flexibility to schedule a meeting and gain all of the needed information.
THE RESULTS
By completing the STARS Waste credits, I learned that specific measurements can be really important for a performance report. For example, since UNE does not measure the amount of waste that is repurposed or donated each year, Erin and I had to put in a zero for this weight. Even though we were able to clarify this value below in the comments, I don’t believe that it gave an accurate representation of UNE. Each year there is a lot of waste that UNE diverts from landfills, but this is not accounted for numerically in STARS. The only account of the waste that is donated or repurposed is in the last comment box in OP-18.
Even though measuring how much waste an institution generates and diverts seems to be important, I am not sure how many institutions have the ability to weigh their waste. Especially small universities, like UNE, that do not have any of the scales for these materials. Alethea did mention how UNE has access to large scales for about two weeks each year in the fall. I do think that these two weeks are useful to UNE, giving the institution a look into how much waste they are producing, but these two weeks are not representative of move out week. Each year, there is a lot of waste generated by students moving out of their dorms, and some of this waste is donated or repurposed.
I thought a solution to this discrepancy would be to measure waste in a volume. At first, it seems like this would be an easy solution to measure the containers that are filled with waste and use this constant measurement every time they are filled. But even this measurement has its own problems. For example, if a chair and a couple of other items were to be diverted from the move out waste stream, it would not be feasible to measure the volume of obscure objects. So, I came to the realization that STARS probably chose the best measurement value (weight in tons), and this reporting tool won’t be perfect for every institution.
