This past April, I (Stella Dunham ‘26) facilitated the ECGO Earth Month Challenge, a collaboration between the Zilkha Center for the Environment (ZCE) and a mobile app called ECGO that encouraged knowledgeable waste disposal habits amongst Williams students, as my main project as a ZCE Zero Waste Intern. By logging recycling or composting materials through the ECGO app, students earned discounts and gift cards from stores, restaurants, and online shops like Target, Walmart, Dunkin’, and Amazon. The Challenge was a competition between 6 other academic institutions: The school with the highest recycling/composting per capita ‘won’ the Earth Month Challenge.
Though this project was a bit experimental in approach – rarely does the ZCE introduce a third party to facilitate its policies and guidelines – running the app became increasingly important to me leading up to Earth Month programming because of some increased on-campus discussion surrounding waste disposal I’d been observing. For one, the College’s recent partnership with Tommy’s Compost Service, a company which collects the College’s produced compost and deposits it at local farms, led to slight shifts in composting policy and conversation. This partnership challenged the previously established norms surrounding waste disposal at Williams, and ultimately enabled more effective composting action by the College. Additionally, an article in the Williams Record published in March by Ellie Davis discussed poor student compliance with the College’s recycling system. Thus, for me, the ECGO app became a way to better understand students’ recycling habits, addressing holes in students’ knowledge about current waste disposal policy, while rewarding students for adhering to College guidelines.
These possibilities for what the ECGO Earth Month Challenge could be in the context of the College caused me to dismiss my initial doubts about taking on the project. To start, I was uncomfortable with encouraging students to contribute to a more sustainable Williams while rewarding them with increased accessibility to wasteful, consumerist brands like Amazon. Another concern was whether or not the rewards offered by the ECGO app would be appealing to Williams students in the first place. Many of the shops partnered with ECGO did not have storefronts within a 20-mile radius of the College, making them inaccessible to students without cars. Without direct access to these shops, would students be interested in gaining rewards?
To remedy this anticipated accessibility issue, I organized a collaboration between Dining Services and the ZCE in the context of the Challenge. The top 5 student Williams ECGO users at the end of the Challenge earned 50 EphPoints or dessert boxes from Dining as a reward for consistently using the app. As students depend almost exclusively on dining halls for their meals, the collaboration was a great way to get students excited about the Earth Month Challenge: It caused recycling and composting ECGO loggings at the College to increase by the hundreds, proving more effective than any of the previous promotional work I did for the project.
At the end of the month, the Challenge proved successful, with 41 participants logging almost 1,000 recyclable or compostable items during the month of April. These results indicate that Williams students are already familiar with recycling and composting policy on campus, and act accordingly: They are unlikely to misuse waste bins. Furthermore, students were more likely to use the app in public spaces, like dining halls, libraries, or academic buildings, rather than their dorms. I interpreted this as an accessibility issue; dorm buildings don’t have individual compost bins, thus restricting the amount of waste that can be logged through ECGO in such spaces. All in all, though, Williams placed 2nd among the institutions who partnered with ECGO for the month, and yielded results that reflected high levels of effective recycling and composting by students on campus.
While impressive, these results didn’t match those observed by Ellie Davis in her Record article on student participation in waste disposal policy, in which high student contamination of recycling bins was presented as threatening to the maintenance of the College’s waste systems. While it encouraged students to use Williams’ waste bins correctly, worked as a case study for future approaches to rewarding proper student behavior, and educated users on current waste policy, waste stream contamination issues remain and kinks in student waste disposal practices are not fully smoothed by the ECGO Earth Month Challenge.
Written by Stella Dunham, ’26, ZCE Zero Waste Intern