Student organization to perform waste audit at OTC for Earth Day

Students from Ozarks Technical Community College’s Society for the Awareness of the Natural Environment (SANE) will be performing a waste audit on the College’s Café on Earth Day, Thursday, April 22.  The audit will take place from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. just outside of the Café, on the north side of the Information Commons on the Springfield campus, next to the dumpster.

Members of the student organization will work throughout the day on Thursday to sort and weigh organic garbage generated in the Café.  The audit will be performed in conjunction with representatives from Custom Metalcraft and SolSource Teknologi, and will serve as a preliminary study to determine the amount of waste the College generates.

“We are doing this to gather baseline information on a potential composting consortium between OTC, Drury, Central HS and the Greene County Jail, all of which are members of the Central Street Recycling Coalition,” explained SANE sponsor and OTC Biology Instructor Kip Thompson.  “Hopefully OTC will be able to partner with a local business to send our organic waste stream to an onsite composter, and at the same time train students to be certified compost operators.”

Earth Day, an event celebrated annually on April 22, was founded as an environmental education day in the United States in 1970.  On its 20^th anniversary, in 1990, organizers made the day an international event.  Earth Day has grown to involve more than 175 countries, and has gone beyond education to include community activities, industry initiatives, rallies, conferences and much more.  For more information on Earth Day, visit www.earthday.org.