“Styrocycle,” a sustainability initiative conceived by four University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate students and several postgraduate advisors, received $90,000 at the National Sustainable Design Expo held in Washington, D.C., Friday through Sunday, according to a news release.
The undergraduate team, composed of sophomore Jenna Walsh, juniors Emily Baumann and Katelyn Budke and senior Jared Ottmann, created a plan to recycle and reuse Expanded Polystyrene containers, commonly known as Styrofoam, on campus.
In collaboration with WE CONSERVE, a UW-Madison program aimed at conservation and waste elimination, the Styrocycle team instituted 15 campus collection sites intended to gather and reuse EPS shipping containers. These containers generally originate from biochemistry and chemistry labs as well as the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. Local biotechnology companies can then reuse the containers, which could benefit the university both financially and environmentally, Baumann said.
“I think it’s important because, from an economic standpoint, the university spends so much money on … anything recyclable going into landfills,” she explained. “Not only could we save money by recycling, but we could also save carbon output into the atmosphere.”
The Styrocycle team plans to collaborate with other universities and implement similar collection programs, Baumann said, citing Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as existing partners.
Additionally, they intend to launch a website to help the public find EPS recycling locations.
“We were surprised that a lot of people didn’t know if their city recycles EPS or where the nearest collection site is so that kind of inspired us, now that we have this funding, to kind of start a web platform where people can log in and figure out their nearest recycler,” Baumann said.
Andrew Markley, one of the team’s advisers, came up with the idea to recycle EPS containers from previous experiences with similar projects. Styrocycle was further developed once the team realized the amount of Styrofoam waste UW-Madison accumulates.
“Within our campus, we noticed that around 10,000 to 20,000 of Expanded Polystyrene shipping containers are being landfilled each year,” she said. “These shipping containers account for 30 percent of UW-Madison’s landfill volume, which is this huge waste on our part.”
Styrocycle operates under UW-Madison’s Office of Sustainability and is co-advised by Markley and Frank Kooistra from the Division of Facilities and Physical Plant Management. Professor Craig H. Benson serves as the team’s principal investigator.
