CU Recycling and Composting Program receives Award

Clemson University has been named the Outstanding Composting and Organics Recycling Program of the Carolinas by the Carolina Recycling Association. The association gives the award to a business, organization, school, agency or large-scale facility in North or South Carolina that has designed and implemented a recycling program. Introduced by Clemson recycling services in 2010, the composting program collects ground food waste from campus dining halls and transports it to a site at Clemson Cherry Farm, where it is combined with mulch and put into a vessel to undergo further decomposition. It then is arranged in piles for temperature monitoring until it is ready for use. The award was based on collection totals for the 2011-2012 school year, during which Clemson recovered 67,125 pounds of food waste for composting. The collection total increased to 156,000 pounds for the 2012-2013 school year.