Jill Bartolotta of the Ohio State-based Ohio Sea Grant program and Sue Bixler of CFAES’s Stone Laboratory have received a nearly $50,000 grant to educate visitors to South Bass Island about plastic trash — how it hurts water quality and wildlife and how to prevent it.
South Bass Island, located in western Lake Erie and home of the tourist town of Put-in-Bay, annually sees more than 800,000 visitors.
Ohio State student employees are digging through garbage cans full of thrown-away food — messy, sloppy, smelly, tossed food — in the name of sustainability. They’re helping with food waste audits being done to help the university try to meet one of its sustainability goals: diverting 90 percent of its waste from landfills by 2025. Read the full story.
In the meantime, researchers will share results from the audits at Ohio State’s Oct. 11 Food Waste Collaborative Conference, which CFAES is sponsoring. Glean further details on the conference’s website, including a link to register.
If buried in a landfill, discarded food rots and produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Limiting landfilled food waste reduces that methane production and in turn helps slow human-caused climate change.
If you’re interested in attending the Ohio Compost Operator Education Course on March 21-22 in Wooster, four grants are available to help you pay for some of your costs. But act fast: the deadline to apply for them is today, Monday, Feb. 26.
Two $225 grants are being offered to members of the Organics Recycling Association of Ohio (ORAO), which is hosting the course together with CFAES, and two $150 grants are being offered to nonmembers.
Registration is open for the Ohio Compost Operator Education Course, a professional development course on large-scale composting set for March 21-22 in Wooster.
Ohio State was recently named the Big Ten Conference champion in the 2017 Game Day Recycling Challenge, a national competition to promote waste reduction and sustainability at college football games. Read the Ohio State press release. (Photo: University Communications.)
Special for a Monday morning: To keep down dust and keep your feet dry, the main road at CFAES’s Molly Caren Agricultural Center, home of Farm Science Review, Sept. 19-21, soon to be walked by more than 100,000 people, has been repaved with a material combining asphalt and ground-up recycled tires.
Today and tomorrow, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.: Bring 10 single-use water bottles to Ohio State’s Ohio Union in Columbus and trade them for a free scarlet-and-gray Nalgene bottle that you can use over and over and over again. It’s part of Time for Change Week.
Today (Wednesday) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.: Bring five plastic bags with you to Ohio State’s Ohio Union in Columbus and trade them for a reusable bag. The bags collected will be recycled. It’s part of the university’s Time for Change Week.
There’s a conference tomorrow in Cleveland on how to eliminate marine debris (plastic trash and more) in the Great Lakes, including Lake Erie. It’s closed to the public, but there’s a second, public event planned for early 2017 to talk about goals developed during the conference. Elizabeth Miller writing for the Great Lakes Today website of WBFO, Buffalo, New York, has the story.
The story quotes, among others, Jill Bartolotta of the Ohio State-based Ohio Sea Grant program.
A new report from the United Nations “finds that biodegradable plastics, commonly found in plastic bags and bottles, degrade at extremely slow rates,” according to a story in the Christian Science Monitor. CFAES scientist Fred Michel is quoted in the story among others. The issue relates to the growing amount of plastic polluting our oceans. The authors of the report, according to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, wrote: “There is a moral argument that we should not allow the ocean to become further polluted with plastic waste, and that marine littering should be considered a ‘common concern of humankind.’”