With the release of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the decade and the call for a waste related goal, those efforts have expanded. In addition to her work with students, Davis has long been a partner with the Office of Sustainability working on numerous projects related to designing out waste from campus. “So, I sort of adopted them, and they began to expand their efforts beyond events and into dorms and policy.”ĭavis’s work with students also extends to the Graduate Student Council Sustainability Subcommittee where she served as an advisor, helping to bridge the efforts of the group as students cycle on and off during their time at MIT. “They were this volunteer group of students who took this on, and when I learned about them, I thought, ‘We need to pay them, make this consistent, and take this further,’’ Davis remembers. Too much contamination can cause materials to be trashed instead of recycled.ĭavis hasn’t been alone in these efforts to design out waste, for the past several years she’s managed students through Waste Watchers-a program where student workers act as a human point of contact at campus events and dining spaces, educating folks as they navigate waste and recycle bins around campus. Davis notes that when community members have clear messages, bins are less likely to be contaminated. “It’s still my biggest goal,” Davis says, explaining that over the years, she has worked with the community to develop and make accessible standard signage for waste, recycling, and food waste bins across campus. These education efforts often took place through signage-an ongoing challenge to impact waste and reuse behavior. “We were really one of the first places to go to single stream and that took a lot of training and education for the community,” she recalls.
At the helm of a new department and team, Davis was presented with the challenge of operationalizing recycling at MIT. When recycling spun off into its own department, Davis was tapped to lead it. “I took my communication skills and training and educated the community more about recycling, trash, and food waste, and really built the program,” Davis says. These efforts helped Davis transition to her role as communications manager in the Department of Facilities, where she worked to promote and support MIT’s recycling program. Davis soon after began volunteering with the Working Group Recycling Committee (since renamed the Working Green Committee), the staff organization that she would go on to chair, which focused on recycling and reuse as well as more broad sustainability initiatives across campus.
The vendor agreed and Davis’s campus zero waste advocacy was born. So, I offered the contract for publishing the course catalog to a vendor in Canada if they would take the old course catalogs for recycling,” Davis says. “Back then, nobody was recycling like that, except in Canada. “The department had pallets of course catalogs just collecting in storage,” Davis remembers, noting that at the time-the late 1980s-there was no campus recycling program for such bulk items. When Davis started working with Reference Publications, the office managed a large volume of print offerings including the course catalog and phone books, many of which went unused, creating a surplus of dated materials. Her path to the role started with volunteer opportunities and advocacy in her early days at MIT. “I worked hard to move things forward.”ĭavis spent much of her career at MIT in communications roles-as the Publications Manager with Reference Publications and then Communications Manager in the Department of Facilities-before becoming MIT’s first zero waste program manager. “When I first started at MIT, there was really no recycling program,” Davis recalls. The event was part of a fitting farewell to Davis who pushed for reuse and zero waste policies throughout her time at MIT.
It would also be the last Choose to Reuse she would host, as Davis retired this summer after 33 years with MIT. It was the first time since the pandemic began that Choose to Reuse-a community reuse event hosted by the Working Green Committee which she co-chairs-would be held. April 21st of this year was a special day for Ruth Davis, the zero waste program manager in MIT’s Department of Facilities.
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