IX. 10% less solid waste by 2025
2025 update
With our current five-year Sustainability Action Plan concluding in 2024-2025, we are set to begin the next phase of our sustainability efforts. The University will develop a new plan that will guide us towards our 2050 sustainability objectives. This plan will address the needs of our tri-campus community and involve a range of partners in its creation.
Stay informed about progress, learn about the planning process, and discover ways to get involved on the Sustainability Action Plan update page.
Everything we throw away is something that we don’t need. That may seem self-evident, but combined with life-cycle thinking it means an opportunity to reduce manufacturing emissions, energy consumption, transportation, and even raw materials extraction associated with whatever object we didn’t need. “Reduce, reuse, recycle” remains a powerful hierarchy of solid waste management, but there are even more details of product and materials management, economics, and urban ecology that can receive both our research attention and our operational attention.
Target actions for 2025
View actions for past fiscal yearsSustainability plan guiding principles
- Ensure students achieve sustainability literacy
- Choose our research conscientiously
- Keep equity and inclusion at the center
- Use resources responsibly
- Decarbonize
Target actions for 2025
UW Recycling plans to continue its waste infrastructure improvements across the Seattle campus, with six building-wide conversions that involves switching to single-stream recycling, adding signage and expanding composting where needed. Infrastructure upgrades will also be implemented for one major renovation, one new building and several smaller projects.
Further expansion of reusable programming within UW Dining and UW Athletics will help advance waste diversion efforts. A project already underway is a reusable cup program set to launch for the 2024-2025 women's and men's basketball seasons at Alaska Airlines Arena. The ReUse Cup Initiative is dedicated to reducing the amount of waste that leaves the UW by replacing single use cups (plastic and compostable) with a sturdy, clean, and affordable alternative that will serve the UW for years to come. The groups leading this initiative areUW Sustainability, UW Athletics, Aramark, Bold Reuse and Pepsi.
Through distributing resources, building partnerships, and creating educational opportunities, UW Recycling is increasing awareness about the importance of reducing overall waste rather than simply increasing the rate of waste going to recycling and composting.
Over the next year, UW Recycling will work to distribute the Waste 101 guide to more professors and involve the UW in the Washington Department of Ecology’s Food Waste Prevention Program. Collaboration with the new UW Medicine sustainability managers will focus on addressing recycling contamination and waste reduction, leveraging insights from Harborview Medical Center’s capstone project on recycling best practices. Lastly, a Trash-In event will be organized to further engage the community.
Over at UW Bothell, the Sustainability Office plans to expand its Give & Go program to two new residential halls on campus. They will also work with Bothell Dining to identify opportunities to divert and reduce waste.