A student-led grassroots effort to make Marshall University more sustainable in 2009 has grown into an entire Sustainability Department with bicycle sharing, a thrift store, and the first commercial compost facility in West Virginia. “For a while, it was just a student garden and a recycling program, which we still have both of, but we’ve added a lot of new programs as part of the department in the past four years,” said sustainability manager Amy Parsons-White.
These include the Rolling Thunder Bike Share, where students can download an app to use bicycles; Gro Marshall Nature-Based Recovery, which uses gardening, meditation, and yoga as therapy; and a compost facility that is the second largest at any university east of the Mississippi River. “Having the compost allows us to dispose of all of our office paper, cardboard, food waste, and lawn waste,” Parsons-White said. Former President Jerome Gilberts signed on to a pledge to phase out single-use plastics by 2026. So another project is replacing those plastics with aluminum, glass, or compostable materials.
Parsons-White said the university is continuing to expand recycling and is in the process of purchasing a glass crusher. The sand produced from the glass can be reused on campus for things like gardening and art and will end up saving the university money on sand purchasing, Parsons-White said.