After everyone has disposed of their trash — and when nobody is looking — a small team of Occidental students returns to the bins to sort compost, ensuring it is not contaminated by trash or recyclable materials. The group, known as the Occidental Student Compost Actions for Remediation (OSCAR), helps to reduce food waste at Occidental and keep the campus clean.
Senate Bill 1383, which came into effect in 2022, requires all entities generating edible food in California work with food recovery organizations to reduce the state’s annual food waste. Assistant Director of Sustainability Alison Linder said Occidental complies with these laws as OSCAR works in the Tiger Cooler and Marketplace — the main sources of food waste on campus.
Assistant Sustainability Coordinator Isa Merel ’23 said OSCAR is a long-standing group and has changed throughout the years. As an alumna, Merel said she saw the organization evolve from “Oxy Composting Association” in collaboration with REHS to its rebranding in 2021–22 with the current name.
“OSCAR has two primary roles. The first is maintaining the compost bins in residence halls and at the cooler […] basically, most of the indoor compost,” Merel said. “Then, the other part of their role is to educate their peers on composting best practices, what does and does not belong in the compost, why composting is important and how students can get more involved with it.”
According to OSCAR President Leila Warren (senior), OSCAR is a student service that employs student workers.
“OSCAR students are able to collect compost and sort out any contaminants so that we’re making sure that we are sending compost products that aren’t contaminated,” Warren said. “Then we’re able to also get data on the types of contamination that [are] present and how the student body is utilizing the compost bin, so we can track student behavior in an interesting way and then use that to target our sustainability campaigns.”
Merel said members of the organization were not previously paid and served on a volunteer basis until her junior and senior years, when they began earning California’s minimum wage.
“There were probably ten dedicated members of OSCAR my freshman year,” Merel said. “Now, I think that there are four or five members […] because it went from a club to a paid position.”
Linder said OSCAR does not have the resources to be everywhere.
“There’s a certain amount that’s budgeted for, and we certainly don’t want them to feel like they need to do more than what they can reasonably do in that amount of time,” Linder said.
According to Linder, OSCAR collects data from each bag of compost sorted and sent to the compost facilities.
“The record would have a sense of how much is collected and then we’re also trying to just understand what the total is. So, from that information, we might be able to make an assessment of whether the program needs to be scaled up or not,” Linder said. “With some of the data we’re collecting, we have opportunities to assess needs moving forward.”
According to Warren, the students in OSCAR feel frustrated by the lack of consideration among students when throwing away trash.
“We just can’t have bins if you don’t have enough staff to be sorting, so that’s definitely a challenge we’ve been running into in the past two years,” Warren said. “We can’t leave one bin out because it just gets so contaminated with trash.”
Sophia Pitrowski (junior), a student worker at OSCAR, said she believes a major contributor to unmanaged waste is the lack of awareness about composting among the student body. She said the most common items incorrectly thrown into the compost were plastic silverware and plastic coffee cups.
“I think there’s just some confusion, because I’ve seen signs around campus that say about what’s compostable or not,” Pitrowski said. “There was obviously a lot of greenwashing with like, ‘Oh, you can compost this,’ but then [with] the compost facilities that we use to create compost, [we] just have to throw it out.”
According to Linder, the lack of consistent waste signage across campus is an issue.
“[It would help] having consistency in the bin colors and the bin labels, and consistency with layouts so they are in logical locations,” Linder said. “I think OSCAR can help as a first step with the signage, but the longer-term goal is consistency throughout campus.”
Warren said OSCAR has been in communication with ASOC’s Sustainability Fund to increase compost education on campus.
“Students are not pausing to organize their waste, which is something we hope in the future can be a shift in the student body — maybe through training, during orientation or something like that,” Warren said. “I think it would change a lot of OSCAR’s job if students were pausing and observing their waste habits more than they already are.”
Merel said the Office of Sustainability is working on several different goals to create a more sustainable campus.
“I think the three big [plans] are updating the signage across campus, not just updating the compost signs, but updating all three streams so that they’re consistent with each other. There’s only one compost bin in each dorm [building], and I think that that is something that we could look at changing in the future,” Merel said. “The other [one is] having some way to get brand new students on board with composting right when they get here would help to change that culture even more.”
Overall, OSCAR hopes to be a more visible and appreciated part of the college community, Pitrowski said.
“It would be nice to kind of be an established part of the school as well. I think that would just make it easier to kind of take momentum, rather than having to restart every semester,” Pitrowski said. “Most people don’t know that OSCAR exists and is a service that we provide. [If they knew] I think people would [compost] more.”
Contact Eliana Joftus at joftus@oxy.edu
