San José State University, a college campus that ranks in the top tiers of universities all over the world in sustainability practices, utilizes a “single-stream” waste management system. Does it meet the expectations for students? We dug deeper.
You’ve got a single-use plastic water bottle you purchased from the Student Union that needs to be recycled. Where do you go? Receptacles stating “SINGLE STREAM – RECYCLING, COMPOST & TRASH” surround every corner of campus. But where does that water bottle end up going?
The Problem
The single stream collection process that SJSU uses is a system that has been adopted by many other cities and takes all materials then combines them into one singular stream that eventually gets sorted at a Materials Recovery Facility, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
Environmentalists and institutes such as the Container Recycling Institute have concluded that single-stream recycling isn’t the most efficient way of managing waste.
The overall cost of this method because of contamination is much higher than the typical three-bin waste system that divides materials into landfill, compost and recycling, according to the same source.
SJSU sends all of their waste from the single stream collection to GreenWaste—a California-based material recovery facility and energy digestion system—which also serves the City of San José as a whole.
San José has the highest rate of contamination in single-family recycling carts at a whopping 57%, according to a city survey in 2022 reported by the Mercury News.
Surrounding cities in the Bay Area including Oakland, San Francisco and Milpitas have much lower rates of contamination, according to the same article.
High school and college students nationwide are concerned about sustainability practices and the effects of climate change, noting “climate anxiety” as one of the most common experiences, according to a survey of 2,000 students from UC Irvine School of Education in April 2024.
What is SJSU doing to combat “the problem”?
SJSU is placed in the top 6% of all universities internationally for their exceptional sustainability practices, receiving the “GOLD” rating (second highest rating) from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
It is also ranked in The Princeton Review Guide to Green Colleges in 2022, according to its “Points of Pride” section of SJSU’s website.
Aaron Klemm, senior director of Energy, Utilities and Sustainability at SJSU, has been with the university for two years and is responsible for managing electricity, water, sewer, wastewater/stormwater and fire alarms on campus.
Klemm was unable to state the exact location of the sites that sort SJSU’s waste from the single stream collection process but said that GreenWaste is responsible for reporting where all waste ends up through the audit process from CalRecycle.
“San José State is an incredibly dense (California State University) campus,” Klemm said. “On our main campus, we have 88 acres, which is somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent of the next nearest sized campus for 35,000 people student headcount.”
The single stream bin solution addresses the need for minimizing the infrastructure and logistics of a three-bin system, according to Klemm.
Single-stream sorting is touted for its convenience and increases in recyclable material captured, but it can also increase the percentage of material lost because of contamination up to 25%, according to a Jan. 10, 2019 FiveThirtyEight article.
With SJSU’s single-stream management, the amount of material recycled and composted decreased to 4,147 tons and 305 tons respectively compared to 2013, when 5,475 tons of material was recycled and 566 tons was composted, according to a Jan. 14 Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System report.
Contamination rates were not reported in the STARS assessment.
Klemm said SJSU will be hiring to fill the sustainability lead position this year and implementing a district energy master plan as well as campus managing expansion operations.
“Not everyone's a recycling expert … this approach is actually as successful as a three-stream approach with less burden placed on our students to be worried about recycling,” Klemm said.
In 2022, SJSU prevented almost 70% of its waste from going into landfills or incinerators, though the total amount of material ending up in those places increased to 1,943 tons compared to the campus’s baseline year in 2013, according to the 2024 STARS report.
Additionally, the amount of waste generated per person on campus has also increased since 2013, according to the same report.
Food Waste at SJSU
In addition to the food scraps that are thrown away in receptacles around campus and carted off to GreenWaste, food purveyors such as Spartan Eats Food Service and the Spartan Food Pantry regularly donate their bulk food waste to SJSU’s Campus Community Garden to be composted on-site under garden coordinator Ruby Howard’s supervision.
In 2022, the garden composted over 1,400 pounds of campus food waste, according to a Nov. 28, 2022 CommUniverCity article.
“We put in 50% nitrogen, so that's the food scraps, vegetables, fruit waste, yard waste, coffee grounds (or) anything organic that's fruit or vegetable based,” Howard said. “Then we do 50% carbon, that's like leaves, cardboard, straw, newspaper, that kind of thing.”
Aerobic composting is the specific method that the SJSU Campus Community Garden utilizes, which has aerobic microorganisms break down organic matter and produce carbon dioxide, ammonia, water, heat and humus through a complex scientific process, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
“We have a separate bin in the Student Union that those businesses put their compost directly into, so it doesn't enter the single stream system at all, but we have an agreement with them and they put it aside for us, which we're really grateful for, because it helps us make dirt,” Howard said.
Howard said she hopes that SJSU will incorporate regenerative agriculture into its practices.
“It's a good wheelbarrow-full every week, at least, from the Student Union and then the food pantry too … the Student Union, they would probably give us even more, but right now, we can't accommodate even more because of staffing and just space limitations,” Howard said.
SJSU’s Environmental Resource Center
SJSU’s Environmental Resource Center is a student activist wing of the Environmental Studies Department, according to its website.
Malvika Malhotra, a fourth-year environmental studies student and one of the directors of the ERC, said that the reason she got into environmentalism is because of her passion for politics. She has been a director at the Environmental Resource Center since fall 2023.
“I think it's really hard for people to understand what goes where when it comes to waste management or how littering affects your local community. Even from the small things to like the large things of air pollution,” Malhotra said.
In a 2021 study on environmental literacy among college students conducted by the National Library of Medicine, researchers found that nearly 40% of the subjects were unaware of the environment.
“I think San José State does a very good job of waste management when it comes to sustainability on campus,” Malhotra said. “I think education is where it (SJSU) is lacking heavily. I don't think a lot of students know about the sustainability features on campus or what San José State has done to make it easier for students to be more sustainable. And they don't really highlight those things as well as they should and students don't take the opportunity of learning those things.”
GreenWaste’s partnership with SJSU
GreenWaste is the company SJSU contracts to haul the single-stream waste and sort it accordingly, according to the 2018 master agreement between the two entities.
GreenWaste employs a material recovery facility (MRF) to separate recyclable materials from the trash while organic materials are composted primarily at GreenWaste sites and the rest of the usable material is converted into energy, according to the Office of Sustainability’s “Waste Management” page.
The company is charged with diverting the majority of the campus waste from landfills, according to the master agreement.
GreenWaste declined the Spartan Daily’s request for comment on the single stream waste management system through SJSU.
What do students think?
Students at SJSU have varying opinions on the sustainability practices of their school which ranges from not knowing much about sustainability on campus at all to directly opposing certain relevant policies at the university.
Raven Hansen, a first-year animation/illustration transfer student, said that reducing waste on campus is important to them and that sustainability is important in every space.
“I haven't seen anything that's necessarily worse than what I've seen (at) other places, but I definitely haven't seen anything actively better that I've noticed,” Hansen said.
Spartan Eats, the organization governing dining on campus as a whole, provides single-use plastic items to students despite the CSU Chancellor ruling in a policy banning all single-use plastics by 2023 at all CSU campuses.
“They give me this single-use fork, this plastic-wrapped napkin every single time and I think it's difficult because this is the only food I have access to on a long day on campus,” Hansen said. “I mean, that would be nice. The day has come and gone though, and I still have this fork in front of me.”
Hansen suggested that SpartanEats should expand the reusable trays in the dining commons to other eateries on campus.
Cindy Vo, a first-year psychology transfer student, said that she thinks the single stream system is helpful for students.
“I have a huge struggle at home with deciding exactly what can be recycled and what can't be recycled, because sometimes they have specific rules about that,” Vo said. “I think it's better to have someone with a little more knowledge sorting things out.”
Despite the cutting-edge technology and methodology that SJSU utilizes, waste on campus still is a huge concern to students all over campus.
“There's definitely a lot of environmental policy existing out there, but as far as people actually following it and people actually being punished for not following it, that's a question of itself,” Malhotra said.
Correction: GreenWaste did not respond in time for publication.
