Members of SRJC’s Students for Sustainable Communities took a hands-on approach to waste management March 8 as they sifted through trash from Bertolini Student Center in an effort to determine the composition of garbage generated from the building. Auditors discovered glaring inefficiencies with how students dispose of garbage.

With gloved hands, SSC members rifled through several trash bags worth of garbage, separating waste meant for landfills from compostable organic materials, such as food waste.

“The idea is to understand how much of the waste streaming from Bertolini is organic material and stuff that can be diverted from landfills,” said SSC’s Jacob Paradise, who is SRJC’s campus sustainability coordinator. He says the SSC’s eventual goal with the waste audit is to create a proposal implementing composting at SRJC.

However, the SSC was unable to audit the full amount of trash from the day because the majority of the garbage from Bertolini was emptied before members of SSC could go through it.

“We’re going to have to do another one,” said SSC president Jessica Jones. Even though they would not be able to fully determine the daily composition of garbage from Bertolini, they hoped that data gleamed from the amount they had is enough, Jones said.

According to calculations performed while examining the trash, SSC determined that 53.5 percent of waste from Bertolini was organic compostable material.

SSC Co-Chief Cameron Williams said that with the numerical data at hand, they hope to initiate composting.