Zero Waste Action Plan
When the College’s strategic plan was finalized and published, the Zilkha Center was tasked by the Provost to convene stakeholders to create actionable plans with more specific strategies for a number of the key sustainability areas.
The Zero Waste Action Planning Group (ZWAPG) spent the 2021-2022 academic year drafting the Zero Waste Action Plan (ZWAP) – a living document that guides our collective campus work on waste management, materials handling, and procurement.
The college’s climate action plan has some overlaps with the ZWAP and can be found here.
In 2023, after completing the Atlas Zero Waste Assessment, Williams College received the Atlas Zero Waste Bronze Certificate.
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The Zero Waste Action Plan has begun detailing out each action into steps and when necessary phases and is working with campus stakeholders to implement the actions. The Zilkha Center is working on creating a Sustainability Dashboard that will lay out sustainability goals - including zero waste - and the progress that the college is making on each.
The college's zero waste goals, actions to achieve those goals, and ZWAPG membership can be found in the doc linked above.
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Atlas Zero Waste is a campus-wide zero waste assessment, scorecard, and certification administered by Post Landfill Action Network. Williams participates in the assessment/certification process every three years, the first time being 2020 and the most recent time being the spring of 2023. Williams student interns are trained as Atlas Fellows and perform a holistic assessment to measure the campus’s capacity to achieve zero waste. In 2020, Williams received a "Participant" certification, and in 2023, the college was awarded a Bronze certification.
Atlas goes beyond the traditional waste diversion metric to assess the college's approach to waste bin infrastructure and policies related to materials management and procurement across the college and within individual departments. Lauren Lynch '23 and Coco Rhum '24 were Atlas Fellows for the initial assessment in 2020, and Saumya Shinde '26 and Brian Lavinio '24 were Atlas Fellows in 2023.
The college's Atlas scorecard is below and the full report is here.