The below article is by Alison Richardson who works in the Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling at the University of Michigan. Last summer, the office worked to compile recycling best practices among top recycling buildings on campus. These best practices were condensed into a guide to help lower performing buildings boost their recycling rates. The full report is available here. The below article is a summary of the key take-aways and findings.

Across the University of Michigan campus, and campuses in general, recycling rates vary widely by building. The U-M Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling sought to document the waste practices of top performing buildings with the goal of assisting facilities with lower recycling rates. The project began with identifying recycling rates, averaged over a three year period, fiscal years 2008-2010, for U-M buildings. Buildings were placed in one of six usage categories; administrative, athletic/recreational, classroom, residence, research and unions, to ensure buildings with similar functions were compared. Current practices were compiled into a best practices report largely applicable to any campus building.

Similar to the highlights of campus sustainability case studies that have been profiled (here and here) we also hope to highlight the excellent student research on campus sustainability that AASHE has available in our resource center. AASHE's student research database (main interface accessible to AASHE members-only) includes papers from undergraduate and graduate students on a wide variety of topics related to campus sustainability. Many of the papers were submitted for our annual student research on campus sustainability award. Although we can only recognize a few papers as "official winners" for that program, there are many exemplary research papers in the database worthy of recognition and wide dissemination.

The issue of reducing bottled water consumption has been gaining traction with many campuses experimenting with restricted sales or with campaigns to reduce bottle water use on campus. Max Liboiron, an undergraduate at New York University wrote and submitted an excellent research paper in 2010 entitled, "H204U: The Culture of Water Consumption at New York University". Included below is the abstract. The full paper may be accessed here.

Michael Rogers, a recent graduate of urban studies at the University of Richmond, is featured in this installment of the AASHE Bulletin Sustainability Student Diary *series.

I had the honor to serve as a judge once again in this year’s Best Practice Awards for the 2010 California Higher Education Sustainability Conference organized by the sustainability office in the Unive