ICAW 2023: 100 ton milestone & more semester updates

Happy International Compost Awareness Week!

Our first commemorative post highlights project updates from March and April.

During this time we….

Reached a big milestone of processing 100 tons of uneaten, non-recoverable food (for the 2 years that scrappy has been operational, not counting offline time during the pandemic)
Expanded our team by creating new roles to enable more event and bin pick-ups.
- Sabrina Fields ‘GS joined the team as a Graduate Compost Coordinator, assisting with food scraps collection efforts in academic departments. Prior to coming to Princeton, Sabrina was at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where she helped coordinate an effort to reinstitute compost in the Keller Center building as students returned to in-person learning. Being her first experience with composting outside of a residential composting program, she learned a lot about how important the education and behavioral aspects of larger-scale composting programs are.
- Victoria Koretsky ’26 joined the team as a Compost Concierge Driver. Victoria drives around campus in our minivan and picks-up smaller buckets and bags of pizza boxes from a few centralized locations on campus, helping to free up time for our operational team
- We also welcomed three new student team members to the operational crew. Check out their full profiles here

OPERATIONAL UPDATES – MARCH & APRIL

As the weather warmed and we entered the busy part of the spring semester without any pauses in operations, our monthly totals have jumped to the highest they have been since the pandemic.

With Sabrina’s and Victoria’s help, we were able to capture a greater amount of food scraps from non-dining venues by beginning new partnerships with the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment, the Real Food Co-op, as well as working with our student Eco-Rep team to collect compostables at various events across campus.

We estimate that we recovered and composted over 150 gal of food scraps and 200 pizza boxes from events over the last two months.