The design and construction of New Battell came with yet another upgrade this fall: a composting system. Bins designated for food waste were placed in lounge kitchens and garbage rooms, giving New Battell residents the opportunity to dispose of their scraps sustainably. Facilities hope to use the new composting options as a test to gauge students’ engagement with the system.
Some dorms have composting options available, but it is up to the student to request a personal bin, according to Facilities Team Liaison for Waste Management Doug Smith. Compost tends to be the most pungent form of waste, and the hassle of emptying and cleaning odorous bins turns off students from requesting them, even if they know they are available. Due to the fluctuating willingness of students to compost, dorm food waste accounts for only a small fraction of Middlebury’s compost.
The majority of Middlebury’s compost, which made up 27% of the college’s total waste in 2024 according to the Middlebury College Waste and Recycling Report, comes from the dining halls. Students are instructed to leave any leftover food on their plates, which is then scraped into composting bins by dining hall staff.
Food waste is collected weekly and transported to Middlebury’s on-site composting facility, located behind the golf course. There, the compost is mixed with manure and woodchips and left to sit for nearly a year, periodically turned by waste management staff. At the end of the process, what were once uneaten lunches become rich topsoil prime for use on Middlebury’s fields or at the Knoll.
Middlebury’s facilities staff, in true Vermont fashion, take sustainability seriously. The Waste and Recycling Report also showed that in nearly every month of 2024, recycled and composted waste outnumbered waste sent to landfills by tens of thousands of pounds. Recycling is sent to Middlebury’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF) where staff determine which bags to send to Addison County Waste Management. In order to be approved for delivery, bags of recycling must have less than one percent of visible contamination. If too many contaminated bags are transported, Middlebury is fined.
The MRF previously handled their own sorting, combing through bags and picking out unrecyclable materials. During the time of Covid-19 restrictions, this practice was halted to protect staff from potentially infectious waste and has not been reimplemented since. Instead, the MRF follows a “zero-sort” policy, which, although less labor-intensive, decreases the amount of material that ends up recycled.
Staff shortages are largely responsible for the implementation of zero-sort. Middlebury once employed up to 30 students to help sort through waste, a tedious process that took up the better part of a week. The facilities team now copes with a lack of helping hands by checking each bag for visible contamination, a quicker, if less accurate, way to handle Middlebury’s waste.
Supervisor of Custodial and Support Services and former Waste Management Director Kimberly Bickham said that she does not foresee the revival of on-site sorting.
“I love everything recycling stands for,” she said. “But sorting is very labor-intensive.”
Nikolas Homan ’29 lamented the lack of composting options in Old Battell. “I’d compost if I could, but I don’t know how to access it,” he said in an interview with The Campus.
With the termination of MRF sorting, the burden rests on student shoulders. The better students, faculty and staff sort their trash, the more waste management can compost or recycle. But with a community hailing from abroad and nearly every state, sorting trash Vermont-style can be quite complicated.
“People come from vast backgrounds,” Smith said. “Every state has different procedures.”
To increase awareness of proper trash etiquette, waste management put up instructive posters near recycling, trash and compost bins. They are also sending out “eco-reps,” students trained in proper waste disposal procedure, to help educate their peers on campus. If students follow procedure, waste management could more easily transition to bagless recycling, a major goal for the team.
“It comes down to how conscious students are,” Smith concluded. “And people tend to follow the path of least resistance.”
