While most of the Grand Valley State University community headed home to celebrate the Lakers’ win on Saturday, 12 volunteers from GVSU’s Green Team stayed behind to clean up Lubbers Stadium by composting and recycling waste left from the football game.

This year, GVSU implemented a zero-waste initiative at all of its home football games after a successful effort at last year’s Homecoming game.

The volunteers removed 392 pounds of recycling and 405 pounds of compost from the stadium on Saturday. Only 245.5 pounds of waste went to the landfill, resulting in a diversion rate of 76 percent.

“Overall this season, 144 volunteers from seven student organizations collectively diverted 71 percent of all waste from the landfill stream—more than 4,000 pounds of trash,” said Kimberly Schoetzow, the graduate assistant for the Sustainable Community Development Initiative. “We may extend the zero-waste initiative (to other games this year). We are also expanding the program to include indoor athletic events.”

GVSU’s best ranking in the initiative last year was sixth place in the compostables division.

“We were competing with the best,” said Steve Leeser, Facilities Service Operations supervisor. “This year, we had volunteers at each home game rather than just Homecoming. I am hoping that we will have enough volunteers to cover every home game again next year.”

This year, the university ranked second out of 62 institutions in waste minimization, with 0.057 pounds of waste diverted per person attending the game.

The zero-waste initiative was a joint effort between the Facilities, Athletics and Campus Dining departments, as well as the Office of Student Life and student groups such as the Student Environmental Coalition, Farm Club, Alternative Breaks, Student Nursing Association, Center for Inquiry, English Society, PanHellenic Association and Interfraternity Council and the Green Team.

The SCDI staff already have ideas in the works to continue the sustainability efforts through next semester and beyond.

“To come out No. 2 in all divisions in this challenge is quite an accomplishment,” said Norman Christopher, executive director of the SCDI. “There will probably be several indoor, zero-waste sports events this winter, as well. More pizza box composting numbers are available, plus a recent Keep Michigan Beautiful award that GVSU received for the above efforts on zero waste and pizza box composting.”

For more information on the zero-waste results, visit www.gamedaychallenge.org/results/waste-minimization.