Interview With George Reis

Special thanks to George Reis for taking the time to speak with me!

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Q: How is NYU's composting program set up? Does it differ from building to building, I know that we have back of house and front of house. What are the logistics?

 

A: So essentially we're composting in the dining halls. The dining halls are run by Aramark, our contractor and it's their responsibility to take food scraps from front of house and back of house. They place them in compost bins that are left curbside and then picked up by Action Carting. In addition to that, in faculty housing in 4 Washington Square Village and Silver Towers they have compost pick ups by Action Carting. So the compost pick ups happen once a day. They happen over night, 6 days a week, Monday through Saturday.

 

On average, though it's been going up lately and it does fluctuate a lot in the academic year, I would say about 15-20 tons (generated) a month. So it's in the dining halls, there's a Starbucks on Fourth Street, there's Argo Tea, The Torch Club... I know for each one of those large buildings and Washington Square Village and Silver Towers they put out about one bin a day, so the majority of it is coming from the dining halls.

 

Q: Is front of house and back of house separated or is it all put together?

 

A: It's all put together. Our (Waste Management Facilities) responsibility-- I manage the Action contract-- begins at the curb so at that point it's not distinguishable, front of house, back of house for us.

 

Q: How efficient would you say the composting program is at NYU?

 

A: It depends on how you would define efficiency in composting. I don't think it's ideal. I think it's better than nothing. An average of 20 tons a month is a substantial amount. We could have more transparency. My own desire and I know the desire of many people at NYU is to have more transparency about where that material goes. We've gotten several answers in the past. We used to be told that it was going to a pig farm… that it was going to feed pigs. We're being told now that it's waste to energy so it's being incinerated, so I don't think that's ideal. I think the ideal and the dream would be that this material would be fully composted and made into finished compost that can be used to amend soil and I think that there's a lot of desire for that at the university and it's something that we're working towards.

 

I think with waste, we're just talking about NYU now, I think it is something that you could go a long way towards standardizing, just because nobody really wants to think about it. Nobody wants to put a lot of time into thinking about the waste streams for their building and they're happy to be included in the overall plan. Even so, there are problems that come up every day. There's a daily drama about removing waste from this campus. New York City's a very tough site to deal with waste but I think that it is possible and I think it's absolutely worth pursuing, doing things on a campus-wide basis, differently from how we're doing it now.

 

Q: Is there anything that NYU is doing to encourage proper waste disposal, in terms of signage and standardization and things like that?

 

A: Our bins are not standard unfortunately and I think that's a real problem. It's something that we really have to address because wherever you go in the university you see bins arranged differently,  they're different shapes and sizes. There was recently a survey conducted where about 300 universities looked at their practices in recycling and we found that the schools that are the top performers, at least half of them have standardized bins. You only get about three seconds of somebody's time for them to think about where they're going to put the material and if they're not sure then it just goes wherever, so my personal view is that bin standardization is important.

 

Although of course there's a cost associated with that but I think it would be great to have standard bins, branded as the “NYU” bins. I think that would really cut down on some of the confusion that happens. Signage I would say is a little bit more standardized but there are improvements that we can make. That signage and the bin itself are very important. I did a training at the Central Park Conservancy and they redesigned their landfill, recycling and composting bins. They spent a lot of money on that for brand new designs, very beautiful designs of bins and they claimed that their recycling increased 25% as a result because it's very clear, there are different colors, and different shapes.

 

I mentioned to George that I went to the Post-Landfill Action Network Student's for Zero Waste conference and heard from students at American University who spoke about redesigning bin lids to decrease contamination...

 

A: American is one of the schools I'm trying to learn from because they're very active and they have many, many things going on and they have a lot of student involvement so I think they're one of the models that I've been watching but as you say the lids are very important.

 

Q: How many dining halls and stores on campus provide plant-based plastic products?

 

A: That would be a better question for Campus Services which oversees Aramark. I don't want to guess about that so to be honest I don't know the answer.

 

Q: Is there a reason that we use Action over other carting services?

 

A: They won the bid. this goes back about 10 years ago and so our contacts office renews their contract and they decide when the contract will be up for bidding and I don't have a firm answer on when they will bid it out again but I expect that they will.

 

Q: What is the rationale of paying more for compost collection when we aren't sure exactly where the material collected is going and it certainly isn't all being composting?

 

A: Well paying more than what? I'll give you an example, I'm really not an expert, I only took this over two years ago so I'm still learning. So when I first started I was like “I'm going to do what they did at Battery Park City.” Battery Park City, they are the compost gurus. They have a composting facility at Battery Park City that makes me weep it's so beautiful... All of the garden waste in 36 acres of Battery Park City gets collected, gets composted. They collect, I think 600 pounds a week of food waste that gets mixed in and with that they have a whole program for using compost not only in the soil but also brewing compost tea, which they make all sorts of claims about its usefulness as a fungicide and all kinds of useful things.

 

I knew about that years ago so when I was put in charge of recycling and waste, the first thing I thought was I'm going to start the way Battery Park City started. And one of the things they started with probably close to 30 years ago was they went around collecting coffee grounds from cafes in Battery Park City and that became one of the things that fed their compost and they said it was very good because it builds community and people see that they're involved. So I said, “that's what I'm going to do! I'll go over to Starbucks over there on fourth street and every day I'll send my guys over there to collect the coffee grounds and we'll put the in the soil, we won't compost them, we'll just add them directly to the soil…” which I found out you can do, it's certainly not going to hurt the soil... it's something tangible we can do. What I quickly figured out after trying that for about two months… and the only thing we did was, we picked up the coffee grounds Tuesday through Friday and walked them two blocks and put them in some plant beds next to the side walk... I quickly learned that that has a huge labour cost. So I'm paying for probably about 5 or 6 man hours a day for them to go over, pick it up, put it into a cart, walk it two blocks, then clean it, remove the plastics, remove the coffee filters and eventing else and then till in into the soil .So let's be very conservative, lets just say it was 4 man hours a day, if you figure around $45 an hour you're getting close to $200 a day to do that operation. We're paying Action about $12 a day so the tote charge a day is just under $7 per tote, that's what it costs for each bin.

 

The rational is the composting probably got added onto their contact because it was the easier thing to do and the cost was deemed to be reasonable, probably at market rate. Action is the largest hauler in the city. So that's generally how those decisions are made and I think it was a good decision but I think we should be open to other things.

 

Q: Is there anything to be said about small scale control and reliability? In the small scale coffee ground operation, there's more security and you know what's happening with those coffee grounds whereas when you put it in a bin and it gets picked up by Action you don't really know...

 

A: Absolutely. My dream and it is a dream... My dream is that all of our garden waste which currently gets bagged and thrown in a landfill... which I think is crazy in itself... my own dream would be to use all of that, to compost it here, in or own small facility, mix in a certain amount of food waste, as much as we can and then use that material here. We have outdoor spaces that are bigger than Washington Square Park, we have places to use the material. It's staffing... it would be a major commitment but I think would also be a real benefit to the university. People could see the closed loop and if you see the one in Battery Park City, it used to be outdoors, it was right next to the Ritz Carlton Hotel so there was no odor, they were very conscientious about it... they've since moved it indoors and there's no odor, it smells just like fresh soil and that's because they're real experts and they're dealing with it every day.

 

I mentioned that we do have some small scale composting efforts like the ones at the Community Agriculture garden and the Urban Farm Lab...

 

A: Right, we've always had those. We've had those for a long time... when Coles was there I had a compost tumbler there. Those are fine but it's not the same level. If you do it at the right scale you can even put in animal products, meat and cheese or with anaerobic digestion, that's a pretty sophisticated operation but just an earth flow system the way they have at Hudson River Park, Battery Park City, those systems I think would be doable here. It’s about the size of an automobile. It's the staffing and they would need training. We actually already have a master composter, it just doesn't have very much to do when it comes to composting. So I don't see big technical barriers but I see barriers in perception.

 

If you look at the schools that do really incredible stuff with their waste, they have their own sorting facilities, they have lots of staff but they also have lots of space. We don't have the space but that just means we have to be more creative about it. Our space is very constrained but I think that sometimes when you have constraints it forces you to be more creative and you come up with solutions.

 

This is only one of many concerns but I think if leadership saw that students really care about it, and you know we're in a moment now, with the sustainability working groups where there is some momentum. We did a waste study in October that showed a tremendous amount of food in the landfill stream, in the library of all places so the fastest way for us to improve our diversion rate and to get things out of the landfill stream is to compost. My staff is going to be doing waste studies to be able to make a case about where our resources should go and it's pretty clear looking at the preliminary numbers, composting is low hanging fruit and I think that once we can show with some real data, the benefit of doing composting in a different way, then it starts to make sense and it becomes clear how it's a benefit to the university.

 

Q: What would it take to see these dreams come to fruition... what are the next steps?

 

A: There's lots of stakeholders at a big university like this and I think the Sustainability Office. They're in the best position, they know the university very well...

 

I'm really warming up to using in house staff. I have good staff, they're proving to me that they're very capable. We hired two new people this year. I'm seeing good results working with them. The good thing about that is you have a lot more control with what they do and they can respond quickly…

 

My preference would be to do more waste studies, have the data and then make the case... here's where the issues are, now let’s figure out what resources we need. Because when academic buildings ask for compost, the idea always falls apart when I ask well who's going to pick it up every day. We know who picks it up on the curb but who picks it up from the office and takes it to the curb?

 

Q: Do you have any advice for students when it comes to composting on campus?

 

A: People are motivated by their emotions and everybody wants to have the feeling that they're doing something… Make your views known to residential life. We just renovated the courtyard at Carlyle Court and we're looking at putting in a bunch of food plants, not as a farm but plants that produce edibles. They have ornamental value as well. It's called a foodscape and we'll put a composter there too and I think it would be great to have students involved in that. I think when students see the operation and become involved and take some pride in it, I think that makes a big difference.

 

I'm motivated because I think it's an interesting problem. Do I have a strong emotional connection? Not really, but I do see the problem and I'm interested in how people solve it. I think it’s also good to have a vision, to have an overarching vision for where you're going and I think that can get you a long way. You look at where people have been successful doing this and instead of just saying we have too many disadvantages here at NYU, those constraints, especially the space constraints, we should view them as advantages. I started here as a gardener and people always told me our spaces are too small for people to care about, they're too small and too fragmented and they get vandalized... I thought there's an advantage to being small and they're small but they have a huge audience. We can do some things in small gardens that you can't do in big gardens. So you focus on what you can do. Sometimes those constraints can free you up. This isn't Michigan State, we're not going to build a recycling facility in Silver Towers, that's not going to happen, but there are other things we can do and lets focus on what we can do and I think there's a lot we can do.

 

I think student involvement is very important. The problem with students is they're kind of transient, they're not here long enough so the challenge is to create a culture that outlasts.

 

I expressed how many students have an interest in this and how we need to keep asking these questions and pushing for improvements...

 

A: I get it constantly and if there were some way of organizing, funneling all of that interest and showing the scale of that interest, I think that would be very good too. I'm not a social media wiz or anything but somebody has to be able to quantify that interest because I get the requests all the time and you know I wish I had something better to tell them. But I think that with all that interest, and now there's a big push for sustainability at NYU, I think there's momentum there and I think we have to seize that. There are costs... there are always costs, but there are costs of doing nothing too. Wouldn't you like to be the neighbor of the institution that does zero waste or composting, does things in a very clean way? That's a nice neighbor to live near and that's a nice institution to be a part of.