Green Campus Spotlight
Rob Gogan is Recycling and Waste Manager for Harvard University Operations Services.
Rob helped start the Resource Efficiency Program (REP), which saved Harvard over $200,000 in energy use, water use and waste disposal costs in undergraduate residences in FY 2003. Over 10,000 readers get Rob’s monthly Harvard Recycling Update, which includes news of Harvard’s recycling and surplus programs plus the Campus Nature Watch, a compendium of flora and fauna sighted on Harvard’s grounds. Rob’s immediate goals are to recover half of Harvard’s waste for recycling by 2005, reduce the University’s waste stream to below 500 pounds per capita in 2004, and to beat Yale in the 2004 Recycle Mania campus recycling contest.
Levels of recycling have steadily grown each year since Rob came on board as Harvard’s first ever dedicated recycling staff person. “When I started in 1990, we recycled about .5% (one half of one percent) of our refuse stream. Last year (2003), we recovered about 38% of our refuse for recycling. I am hopeful that we will break the 40% mark for calendar 2004.”
Not one to steal a spotlight, Rob diffuses the credit for the steady improvement of waste reduction at Harvard across to the many members of the Harvard community that it takes to succeed in such an effort. He credits students and staff for making daily decisions to reduce, reuse and recycle, the ingenuity of other community members who come up with creative and innovative ways to reduce waste and to educate others about waste reduction and recycling. He gives Harvard departments their due for their willingness to donate furniture and supplies and set aside storage space to hold these items prior to Surplus Giveaways and Stuff Sales, and for their efforts to streamline their processes to encourage waste reduction further upstream. And of course he gives a thumbs up to larger institution of Harvard University for supporting these efforts overall.
One of Rob’s reuse programs is the Harvard’s Surplus Distribution program, which in 2003 donated over $1 million in furniture, clothing, books, computers and other reusables to non-profit groups, neighbors and the needy. Rob coordinates a number of annual special reuse activities including the Valentine’s Day Cosmetics Drive (where participants donate unused cosmetics to go to local homeless shelters), and the Green Move Out. Rob also coordinates the annual “Stuff Sales” so that students can buy furniture and appliances that have been salvaged from Harvard departments and students who have moved out at the end of the prior academic year, with the proceeds going to support Habitat for Humanity construction projects.
Rob has been an avid champion and an honorary member of the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, participating as a guest lecturer the HGCI Course Sustainability, the Challenge of Changing Our Institutions , and serving on the HGCI Interfaculty Advisory Committee and the REP Steering Group. Rob serves as a wonderful resource for HGCI Staff and is always excited to help out.