It’s 12:35 p.m. and you just finished eating lunch with your friends in Rastall’s. As you walk out, you approach the black, green and blue bins. You scrape your half-eaten bagel into the green one, which is labeled compost.
Your table scraps land there among banana peels, napkins and other unfinished food. Waste accumulates fast as more food drops on top of it while students stream past.
From 2023 to 2025, the amount of waste CC composts has dropped from 9.02% to 5.13%, according to a report from Republic Services, the school’s waste hauler.
Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) provides another framework for CC and other colleges to self-report and track their sustainability efforts. The college’s STARS rating peaked in 2022, scoring 72.81 points out of 100. However, CC’s score declined for the last two years, to a rating of 65.41 in 2024. Even so, the school has retained its gold rating, which is the second highest.
According to Mae Rohrbach, program ma nager for the Office of Sustainability at CC, the decline in composting could be attributed to students throwing more compost into the landfill. She explained that, according to audits conducted at waste management buildings, much of what ends up in the landfill could be recycled or composted.
Donations from Rastall Dining Hall to the CC Pantry, which the audit doesn’t account for, as well as the 65-gallon compost bins located around campus, and the college’s move away from bioplastics, could also contribute to the decrease in composting.
Back in the compost bin, your bagel sits there long after the lunch rush clears out.
Eventually, an employee in a grey Sodexo polo, contracted by the company to provide cleaning services at CC, pulls heaping black trash bags full of compost out of the bins. They take a cart full of compost to a green dumpster that sits by the entrance to the Adam F. Press Fitness Center. The employee then dumps the compost into the compost dumpster and disposes of the black plastic bag in the one slated for the landfill.
According to Jay Jeanneret, Director of Sodexo at CC, the reason they use trash bags in compost bins is that there aren’t “adequate wash stations” for Sodexo to clean bins that would be dirtied by compost and recycling without bags. Jeanneret said that CC would have to build wash stations to change this process.
“It’s not a very great system,” Rohrbach said, “But it’s what we have.”
A day or two later, a blue truck with a red star on the side rolls up to the compost dumpster. Your half-eaten bagel, along with the rest of the compost, gets dumped into the back of the Republic Services truck. The composting facilities evaluate the contamination, or the amount of trash mixed in with the compost, according to internal standards.
“To my knowledge, most composting facilities aim to keep contamination rates below approximately 10%,” Rohrbach said.
If the load is clean enough, the truck heads down I-25 to Waste Management’s Midway landfill just outside of Fountain, Colo., to the compost facility. At the facility, the truck dumps your bagel, along with everything else, into a long pile of compost called a windrow.
The idea of recycling organic material into the soil, or composting, has been around since the Neolithic era. Humans practice it in Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean area and China, the Amazonian rainforest area, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and North America, to name a few.
Composting in the United States gained traction in the 1960s when concerns for the effects of fertilizers were rising.
There is little information on the history of composting in Colorado Springs, but infrastructure for it dates to 1991, when the U.S. Air Force Academy built a small composting installation.
Colorado College created its Office of Sustainability in 2013. Their Campus Compost Program, which allows houses both on and off campus to have personal compost bins, has been in place since 2021.
Back at Midway, your bagel heats up to between 130 and 160℉, and microbes begin to break down the waste to create nutrient-rich soil. As the bagel decomposes, a yellow excavator turns the soil to mix it with oxygen.
Specialists monitor the compost for optimal conditions to break down and cure the compost, a process that kills pathogens and weed seeds.
For both Rohrbach and Jeanneret, composting is an important way to stop waste from going to the landfill. Financially, it is cheaper for Colorado College to compost, but it is also a way to “give back to the planet,” Rohrbach said.
With so much waste in the world, “we’ve got to find more economical ways to not just throw everything in the dirt,” said Jeanneret.
As for the trash and supposedly compostable things that don’t compost well, “they shuffle it out afterwards,” said Rohrbach. The clean, nutrient-rich soil is then sold back to the community. Your bagel is now soil that a local farmer will use to grow their crops.
When you compost something, it has another “life ahead of it,” said Rohrbach.
If you are one of the volunteers at the CC farm located just north of where Uintah Street crosses over Monument Creek, you may not scrape your bagel into the compost. Instead, you might save it and bring it to the farm and throw it onto the freshest of the three compost piles. There, it would decompose until the spring, when the days start to get longer and the air warms. Then a volunteer may shovel the new soil onto a plot and plant garlic or tomatoes.
Josefina Rodriguez-Poggio ‘27 said the soil is rich in organic matter and very good for plant growth.
Composting fascinates Rodriguez-Poggio, and she thinks that it connects people to natural cycles. “Nature actually takes care of it all,” she said.
Rodriguez-Poggio was the one who initiated composting at her apartment, and she is not sure if all students feel the same fascination with these processes.
“Every time I look at a compost bin at this school it’s filled with things that are not compostable, which is pretty sad,” she said. “I don’t know if students don’t understand what composting is or if those bins are not taken as seriously as they should be.”
To be sure, the composting program at CC isn’t without its problems.
“A lot of it probably has to do with where that student is coming from,” said Jeanneret.
Places where some students grew up might have completely different regulations relating to composting and recycling.
“Composting isn’t a common practice in many homes,” said Alyce Watt, a student and the Administrative Program Coordinator with the Office of Sustainability.
Jeanneret said that, depending on their home habits, some students are probably wondering, “What are these different colored trash cans?”
To add to the confusion, the signage regarding compost is also not uniform. A “residential experience pilot program” headed by Rohrbach is being implemented in South Hall to improve the bin and signage infrastructure, so that signs will be consistent throughout South, and hopefully, all of campus.
Rohrbach is also adding small trash cans in the bathrooms, since there are only compost bins now and people often throw trash in them. Expecting students to do the right thing is unrealistic when there is no option available. These bins will help reduce the amount of trash thrown in the bathroom compost bins.
Adding to the confusion when it comes time to compost, certain things might look compostable but aren’t necessarily, and vice versa.
For example, the beige straws provided in Colorado Coffee and Susie B’s are compostable. Cold coffee cups and Coke bottles are only recyclable if rinsed out. If a pizza box is grease-free and empty, it should be recycled. If it has food on it, it should be composted.
“When in doubt, throw it out,” said Rohrbach.
One challenge is the silverware provided by Bon Appétit at The Preserve and Benjamin’s.
These places started off the year offering wooden silverware, but students complained at the taste of the wood. They switched to plastic silverware, but the recycling plant in Colorado Springs doesn’t accept plastic silverware. Bon Appetit and the Office of Sustainability are working to find a solution.
Education is the most important and challenging part of the composting initiative at CC. Every year, the education process starts over again as new students come in.
“It never ends,” said Rohrbach.
“I’m not even sure all faculty and staff understand,” said Jeanneret, speaking on the composting process at the college.
“I think that there need to be more widespread educational materials,” Watt said.
The signage is the main infrastructure in place to educate people about composting.
Watt thinks that the signage is incredibly clear and that “a quick glance into any waste receptacle will reveal that students are likely just placing their waste in the most convenient receptacle for them.”
If students have questions, Rohrbach and Watt urge people to contact the Office of Sustainability. There is also a website with resources and official waste guidelines.
Jeanneret thinks that CC should have high expectations of students when it comes to sustainability. From admission, CC should have a clear expectation for students to participate in composting and recycling. Rohrbach and Jeanneret even discussed putting forth a program to teach students and staff about sustainability initiatives.
Watt said that “perfection is not human” and that people shouldn’t be afraid to try composting even if they don’t understand it, and people who do understand should encourage their friends to compost as well.
“People can’t be controlled,” said Jeanneret, “But they can be educated to do the right thing.”