UW-Madison: Students focus on sustainability in business class

CONTACT: Tom Eggert, 608-267-2761, teggert@bus.wisc.edu

MADISON – It’s hard to imagine getting confused about something as simple as throwing out your lunch scraps.

But there it is at Grainger Hall’s Capital Café at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: a confounding array of options at the trash bins. One for vegetables and paper napkins, another for meat and dairy, yet more for mixed paper, cans and bottles, and plastic cups.

The trash options are complicated by the café’s efforts to encourage its patrons to try composting their food waste. The practice of biodegrading organic materials has been slow to catch on at the UW-Madison eatery because those who dine in the business school’s café often don’t know what to do when confronted with the series of bins.

“It’s a lot to take in when you walk up to a bin,” says James Harrod, project manager for UW-Madison’s We Conserve, a conservation and environmental awareness group. “We’ve found a lot of confusion and a lot of waste still going in to the compost bin.”

A group of UW-Madison students is working to make the process a little less confusing while educating diners about the benefits of composting. They’re part of a class on sustainable and environmentally sound business practices offered through the Wisconsin School of Business. Each semester, student teams work to produce “green” recommendations in response to certain questions posed by their business clients. Those questions range from designing marketing plans to developing organizational recommendations for companies as varied as retailer Lands’ End and small Madison textile importer Terra Experience.

The We Conserve student group surveyed about 160 Capital Café customers about ways to encourage composting, developed an educational campaign to teach those who are interested how to compost and enlisted help from design students to redesign those confusing trash stations.

Tom Eggert, co-director of the business, environment and social responsibility program at the School of Business, teaches two classes on sustainable business practices that send students into the business community to help clients from businesses of all sizes find ways to put sustainable business practices in place. The classes started in the mid-1990s but have gained importance as companies face pressure from customers, investors and employees to be concerned about their environmental footprint.

“The fear early on with sustainability is this is something only the big businesses can afford to look at because they can hire a sustainability person,” Eggert says. “It turns out, there’s an awful lot of small businesses whose niche is created by this.”

Most of the consulting projects for Eggert’s class are for off-campus businesses that are wrestling with how to be more green or use more sustainable materials.

A few years ago, Springs Window Fashions in Middleton wanted the class to assess its packaging and make green recommendations.

The students working for Springs had a very simple idea: Put a message on the package saying it was made from recycled material and offer specific instructions on how to recycle each type of material.

“We went through all this work with suppliers to use recycled materials, but we were so focused on our business we forgot to tell the consumer about our program, and especially what to do to recycle the materials,” says Tom Rodgers, Springs’ marketing director. “Sometimes things are right in front of your face.”

We Conserve is already collecting one to three tons a week of pre-consumer waste from food preparation and coffee grounds, and the program at Grainger Hall is intended to add post-consumer waste from eating facilities on campus. The students’ recommendations and designs could have implications for other universities or large-scale organizations that want to encourage composting.

“Sustainability is not an end product…it’s a continuous process,” says Tory Shelley, a graduate student in conservation biology and sustainable development at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and one of the students working with We Conserve. “If we can come up with a model and we have a successful composting program that other large universities or a hospital or other huge institutions can adopt in some form, that’s invaluable.”

The We Conserve group is also tackling the confusing setup at the café’s shiny aluminum trash areas. Heidi Tune, an interior design student in the School of Human Ecology and part of the student group working with We Conserve, drafted two classmates in her design studies class to create models of potential new trash stations to make the process less confusing.

The three designs from Tune and her classmates Molly Dimond and Jeffrey Lindstrom incorporate elements of color-coding, clearer wording on signs and space for people to set down trays and sort garbage.

“Through design, you can affect people’s emotions, movement and what they use and how they act,” Tune says. “That’s really what we’re trying to start doing.”

Other projects for Eggert’s class this semester have impact away from campus.

Lynn Persson, owner of Terra Experience, has been importing textiles from small communities in Guatemala for more than a decade. But as she’s worked to increase energy efficiency in her Madison office, she’s still concerned about the carbon footprint she’s leaving when she ships hundreds of pounds of textiles from Central America.

“I was interested in figuring out how, as a retail and e-commerce business, I can track energy use and show progress in a way the customers can understand, and which is credible to my customers and myself,” Persson says.

Persson has been working with a team of students who calculated her carbon footprint and identified projects that would help her offset the environmental impact of her importing business. Some possibilities include purchasing sections of the rain forest for preservation or buying solar-powered stoves for smoke-free cooking, says Gergens Polynice, a graduate student in sustainable development, whose group is working with Persson.

Meanwhile, Dodgeville catalog and online retailer Lands’ End has a handful of projects it wants Eggert’s students to research. It started with having the students recommend ways to build a coalition to support potential construction of alternative energy sources on its 175 acres of land outside Madison to power the retailer and other partners.

Robert McElroy, senior vice president for international and leader of Lands’ End green efforts, is hoping to tap the skills and resources of Eggert’s students again in future semesters.

Ideas about sustainability and conservation are more ingrained in students coming from a younger generation than many of those who work for their business clients, he says.

“The younger generation is living this every day,” McElroy says. “For people who have been in business for some period of time, this is all brand new.”

Editor’s note: This story highlights the Wisconsin Idea. For more, visit http://www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu