ASU library staff members are peeking through book-filled shelves and independently filling cracks in ASU’s sustainability goals to reduce waste in their department.
Interlibrary Loan is a department within ASU that students can use to request items from libraries not from the University. Thanks to independent initiatives by ASU staff, the department produces almost entirely zero waste, multiple department members said.
Though ASU has made several efforts outside the University to make positive environmental changes, individual departments at the University often have to take matters into their own hands. This is exactly what the Interlibrary Loan team did.
ASU and the city of Phoenix partnered to meet solar sustainability goals. Other ASU efforts include studying and preventing coral bleaching in Hawaii and planning to conserve water with the city of Phoenix.
The department found a way to be environmentally proactive by launching a system in which library staff members reduce waste by recycling all packing equipment used in the shipping process.
“Sometimes we get more than 50 boxes in a day,” said Alvaro Medina, lead library information specialist for Interlibrary Loan. “Hundreds of boxes a week ... we were completely unsure about what we could recycle and what to throw away.”
Medina said that he and a group of co-workers saw the amount of waste within their department and independently sought to make a change.
Once-discarded boxes are now used and re-used until they can no longer hold the books they were made to contain. Once the re-use system became a well-established practice for the department, they started to wonder how else to reduce their waste.
Jon Moneyhon, a library information specialist, said department members took some time to go through shipping supplies. From FedEx labels to packing tape, Moneyhon said he realized every step of the shipping process offered more opportunities to be sustainable.
“We just knew that when it comes down to it, we can always do better,” Moneyhon said. “We wanted to see what was out there and what was both sustainable and cost-efficient.”
Although the efforts of the staff are independent, Moneyhon said the University has shown its support, and boxes that could not be re-used are picked up once a week or at the request of the department staff.
According to ASU’s 2011 Strategic Plan for Sustainability Practices and Operations, ASU once planned to eliminate 90% of campus solid waste from landfills by 2015. The boxes piled high at the Interlibrary Loan department represent the department's independent and self-driven commitment to sustainability.
