Words by Lucy Binfield and Caitlin Lichimo.
The UBC 2030 Zero Waste Action Plan aims to reduce operational waste disposal by 50% by 2030 in attempt to progress towards a zero-waste community. Despite seeing a 13% reduction in operational waste disposal across campus and several pilot initiatives underway, areas of improvement continue to exist in order to reach these goals.
Waste sorting: a stubborn sustainability challenge
With UBC’s 2030 Zero Waste goals on the horizon, this year Student Housing and Community Services, Campus + Community Planning, and the SEEDS Sustainability Program set out to find a solution for one of the most stubborn challenges: the amount of organic waste being incorrectly placed into the garbage and other recycling streams in student residences.
Despite waste sorting infrastructure in every residence building, clear signage, and ongoing education and communication efforts to promote UBC’s Sort It Out campaign, a 2024 audit of the Marine Drive Residence found that less than 15% of organic waste was correctly sorted by residents into the food scraps bin. These low rates are similar to those found in some high-rise rental buildings.
Engagement with students about the issue highlighted the main barrier: it wasn't lack of knowledge, but the unpleasantness of the task. Carrying a smelly food scraps bin in the elevator all the way down to the basement to a strong-smelling waste collection room is no one’s idea of fun.
A pilot program to explore waste sorting solutions in Marine Drive residence
So how best to solve the problem? Forestry PhD student Lucy Binfield collaborated with Student Housing and Community Services to come up with a plan to find out. In 2025, they co-created a pilot program that ran between February to March to test different solutions, or combinations of solutions, in four buildings at the Marine Drive Residence to see which would have the greatest impact:
- Marine Drive Building 1: Waste room bins were brought to residence floors one day per week and placed outside the elevators.
- Marine Drive Building 2: Service staff collected food waste from inside units and changed compostable bags in the units twice weekly.
- Marine Drive Building 5: Residents didn't see any changes, but post-consumer waste sorting was serviced.
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Marine Drive Building 6: Food scraps were collected twice weekly, and four-stream bins were left on residence floors to increase convenience.
In addition to those interventions, Lucy ran a student survey to determine students’ recycling knowledge and held focus groups with students about the different interventions.
“Making relatively small and cost-effective changes to the way we collect and sort waste in university residence can have an outsized impact on UBC Zero Waste goals. The results of this pilot program provide a practical and attainable way forward for waste sorting in UBC residences.”
- Lucy Binfield, UBC Forestry PhD Candidate
Results show students respond better to knowledge support and convenience
The results of the pilot program showed that supporting students through food scraps disposal from inside their residence unit (Building 2) increased recycling behaviour across all streams. This was much more effective in comparison to moving the bins up to each floor (Building 1), which increased cross-stream contamination.
The food scraps pick up (Building 6) doubled recycling rates across the board, saved more than half a tonne of waste from the landfill over the four-week pilot, and even increased container and paper recycling without directly targeting those streams.
While the post-consumer waste sorting (Building 5) led to the best diversion rate, it was also the most expensive, and students weren’t learning how to better sort their waste.
Expanding the new waste sorting program to other UBC residences
Implementing food scraps pick up across campus could help us make significant progress towards the Zero Waste goal of reducing all waste to landfill by 50% over the 2019 baseline. This fall, Student Housing and Community Services will be implementing an expanded pilot in all buildings at the Marine Drive residence, and depending on performance, may expand to similar residence areas in the future.
“This pilot project underscored to us the importance of talking with students and understanding what the true barriers are for them, so we solve the right problems. We now have a practical way forward to solving an important sustainability challenge."
