From the wrapper recycling bins in Olin-Rice to the clothing racks in 1550 Summit, the Sustainability Office has been on a journey to implement a Zero- Waste Program that reduces and sorts waste at Macalester.
“If you know about [Hennepin Energy Recovery Center] (HERC)… and where our waste goes in Macalester, it’s important to understand that accumulating our garbage directly affects communities near us,” Oliver Matus-Bond ’26, a PLAN Atlas fellow, said. The Zero-Waste Program began about a decade ago with the goal of reaching zero waste by 2020, as stated by some placards around campus.
“I think the big thing that we want to advertise is that we failed,” Matus-Bond said. “So we want to make smaller goals and encourage the larger population into getting closer [to net zero].”
The mindset change from a hard and fast deadline to meet the net-zero goal to taking a more gradual approach came about through a desire for community buy-in and engagement.
Partnering with the Post Landfill Action Network (PLAN), a group of three Macalester students, Matus-Bond, Lorenna Graham ’26 and Abby White ’26, became Atlas Fellows. PLAN is an organization that partners with students who are passionate about furthering their institutions’ mission of sustainability. PLAN provides structure for their fellows to implement long-term waste management infrastructure.
Along with graduated fellows Jeanarry Rodriguez ’23 and Susanna Deal ’25, the current fellows have implemented stages for their sustainability action plans for the campus and are now working to create a fourth stage.
Stage 1, completed in 2021, focused on a sustainability assessment of the college. This stage helped Megan Butler, the director of sustainability, and the graduated Atlas Fellows evaluate how waste was managed on campus.
The team maintained this momentum during Stage 2 by creating a vision that would improve and streamline waste management conditions based on assessment. Stage 3, beginning in 2023, when the current fellows began, proposed an implementation process using the network of tools that PLAN provided. White, Graham and Matus-Bond wrote 10 sections over 136 pages detailing their sustainability implementation plan and how different campus partners will aid them in this goal. They formally completed Stage 3 in March 2025, marking Macalester as the only college so far to have completed all three stages.
Throughout the stages, each of the Atlas Fellows has worked with Butler to implement sustainable programs from different angles of campus life. The Fellows work most directly to encourage and educate students, staff and faculty in Sustainable Scot training about different waste sorting systems on campus.
“We want to embed a campus culture of zero waste throughout the school,” Butler said. “We want to make sure everybody on campus, from faculty to staff to students to visitors, understands what Zero Waste [At Macalester] is and how to properly participate in that goal.”
Historically, first-year residence halls had some of the worst waste sorting rates on campus, due to many new students lacking familiarity with Macalester’s sorting system. During orientation week, incoming students are taught by the Sustainability Office how to work within the sustainable systems set up here, compared to the ones they are likely familiar with.
“We have been implementing Sustainable Scot training for the first-years, and it’s become so much more successful,” Graham said. “This year we had 75 percent [of the new students attend] which was really good, because last year there were like 10 students.”
This prevention based method allows sustainability to become the norm at Mac, a goal of the effort towards zero waste.
Meanwhile, the PLAN fellows are currently pioneering Stage 4, looking into concrete implementation and making tangible progress towards zero waste. They are also attempting to go through a reassessment process to further understand where Macalester is according to the benchmarks set by PLAN.
“Basically, it’s different projects like the reusable containers [at Cafe Mac], trying to get [that] system working, and then implementation, expanding to other locations and then other things, like [getting] student involvement,” White said.
Butler encourages something simple that students, faculty and campus partners can do to help assist in the efforts of zero waste.
“At the end of the day, the simplest thing is [to] learn how to recycle and compost,” Butler said. “Know where you can go for those resources and then use them correctly and encourage your friends too.”
