Recycling, Compost & Waste

The University of Washington Seattle campus won the education & awareness category in the 2025 Campus Race to Zero Waste Case Study Competition.

As spring quarter comes to a close, the thousands of students moving out of the residence halls often have items they no longer need but are still usable. This June, a UW program made sure 59,718 pounds of those items went to local organizations and on-campus reuse groups instead of the waste stream.

The Student Clean-up, Recycle and Move-out, or SCRAM, program is designed to bridge the gap between those unwanted items and organizations looking for donations.

Campus artists utilized their own waste to create thoughtful and delightful pieces in UW Recycling’s sixth annual contest. This year’s submissions included a cat statuette made entirely from bread bag tags, a life-size bathroom display constructed by a house of students and placemats weaved from plastic newspaper bags.

UW Recycling's 2025 Trash Art Contest opens February 12! Participants must create an art piece from items normally thought of as waste or a literary piece about waste and sustainability. This contest is open to all UW students, faculty and staff.

Categories include:

• 2D art
• 3D art
• Textile art
• Literature

Submissions are due March 28, 2025 at 4 p.m. PDT. Winners for each category will receive $100 or $50 e-gift cards to a low-waste shop or art store.

Campus Race to Zero Waste (CRZW) starts again at the University of Washington! For the thirteenth year, the UW will participate in the friendly recycling, composting and waste reduction competition between colleges and universities.

CRZW runs February 2 to March 29, 2025. UW Recycling is organizing and promoting activities focused on waste reduction as part of the competition. Here are some ways you can participate:

Fans attending Husky events at Alaska Airlines Arena this season will notice a new sustainability effort, with all soft drinks being served in reusable cups.

The initiative is a partnership with PepsiCo, Bold Reuse, and Aramark Sports + Entertainment, and will be in place for Husky basketball, volleyball, and gymnastics events throughout the 2024-2025 season.

Sustainability is part of the fabric of the University of Washington. One of the ten goals in the UW Sustainability Action Plan is to produce ten percent less solid waste by 2025. This means reducing the amount of waste the UW sends to the landfill by ten percent.

Rethinking and reusing items are some of the most impactful ways to move towards our goal. Programs across the UW focus on rethinking and promoting reuse. Below are programs offered at the UW Seattle campus.

The phrase recycling contamination isn’t clear to people outside of the waste industry. Let’s break it down:

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, contaminate means "to soil, stain, corrupt, or infect by contact or association" or "to make inferior or impure by admixture." In recycling, a contaminant is something that should not be in recycling because it can degrade other materials or the recycling process.

Even when we do our best to reduce food waste, it's inevitable some scraps will need to be disposed of. It’s important to ensure that this waste ends up in the proper receptacle - your compost bin!

Winning pieces use art to spark conversations about waste

For the fifth year, artists from around the UW created dazzling art pieces in the annual Trash Art Contest.