Ripon College Sustainability: Campus Sustainability has a new home

Campus Sustainability is off to a busy start. On Thursday of this week I met with the new Sodexo intern for Sustainability, Kaitlyn Welzen (WelzenK@ripon.edu). It was great hearing about the work she intends to be doing as the intern. I'm sure there will be at least one post dedicated solely to her. However, for a preview, here's the focus of the work she'll be starting this semester:

Initiating a Food Council in the residence halls. This will be a forum where dorm residents can meet with her to give her feedback on the food service on campus and get to comment or preview the upcoming menus. Here's a great chance to get your voice heard!
Currently organic waste is collected in some of the prep areas in The Commons kitchen. Kaitlyn, who also has worked for Sodexo, will work to educated those doing the prep work on what is compostable and set up clearly labeled compost bins and a bin storage area. During the growing season, the campus compost is taken to Frasier Farms right here in Ripon. Even though you won't see composting in the dining rooms this semester, it is happening in the prep areas. If you're interested in helping us quantify how much food is being composted, please get in touch with the Coordinator or Kaitlyn.
Finally, Kaitlyn will be working on putting in place a process for donating unused and pre-made food to area food banks.

These are ambitious goals, but certainly attainable. This really is an exciting time to be working on food-related topics here on campus. (See pictures of the delicious food growing on campus)

After meeting with Kaitlyn I had the privilege of presenting the mission and activities of Campus Sustainability to this year's Orientation Committee (the talk I gave can be found here). What a great group of students. There are now 34 additional students on campus who know about sustainability and who will help get out the message about reducing our carbon footprint using common sense actions. I hope these students will stay in touch and keep bringing me their ideas.

Also on Thursday, Campus Sustainability found a home on campus. The office of the Sustainability Coordinator is in 207 Smith Hall.

Finally, before leaving campus, I swung by the Facilities building to drop off some more Single-Stream recycling labels to be used on containers around campus. While there I took a look (and then a walk) around the campus garden. It is bursting with tomatoes and cucumbers. The pumpkins are looking adorable. It will be so fun to harvest them come October. The garden is largely the work of Kaitlyn Welzen (yep, same one who is interning at Sodexo). The fruit trees planted over the last few years by the fine folks at Facilities are starting to bear fruit. I can't wait to taste the different apple varieties.