LEXINGTON, Ky . - The bluegrass state's flagship university is actively moving towards making it's campus a zero-waste school.

Campus officials at the University of Kentucky say they are receiving buy-in from students and faculty on the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling waste products while on campus.

“So we’re restoring ecological functions of this stream to provide stormwater benefits downstream and that impacts the communities around the campus. To build naturalized streams, you naturalize materials and so when the contractor got onsite, he started asking about tree material and we were able to provide some giant tree trunks from some tree trunks that had to be taken down for one reason or another and those are now going to be integrated into that stream re-build,” explains Shane Tedder, Sustainability Coordinator at the University of Kentucky

Stormwater management is just one of the many ways that the bluegrass state’s flagship university is moving closer to its goal of reducing the amount of green waste into a full-blown campus-wide initiative.

“So within the next three years, over half of the waste, we produce we want to either recycle, re-use or compost. This green waste that we’ve been talking about today is going to be composted. It’s going to get cycled back into another product and in a lot of cases, we can close that loop and use that product on campus,” adds Tedder

The university has invested in several new products to help them get closer to its goal of reducing green waste on campus, including the addition of this new product, called the Leaf Burrito.

“Leaf burrito is a real functional, little piece of equipment, if you will, that we can load up, zip up and dump it and re-use it. Before, up until just about an 8 to 9 months ago, we were filling up 30 or 40,000 plastic bags a year with green waste and then it would just get tossed into a dumpster,” says Don Crawford, Ground and Fleet Manager, University of Kentucky

Crawford says one of his short-term goals is to collect leaves and branches from dead trees and then mix them with food waste that eventually will allow workers to recycle the waste and re-purpose it for different uses on campus.

“Our goal is to take that dumpster of green waste, take it out to a farm that the university owns, process it, compost it, bring it back to campus, use it as compost, or mulch or fertilizer, a number of other products," adds Crawford

With UK's campus-wide recycling infrastructure growing, the university plans to continue offering educational opportunities to its campus community, to encourage more recycling participation from its students and faculty.