From partnering with the city of Oxford to encourage public transportation to helping students with capstone projects, the University of Mississippi’s Office of Sustainability is working to make the community more environmentally friendly.
The office focuses on ways that the campus can reduce trash and food waste through partnership with the university and the Oxford community. One partnership that is currently underway is one with the City of Oxford’s bus system to promote ridership.
“We’re also just really focused on being like a nexus point that different campus stakeholders, whether they’re students, faculty (or) staff,” Associate Director of Sustainability John Brugge said. “Pretty much anybody who comes on the campus should be able to come to us to get access and support, to help build programs to connect to our natural ecology or to figure out how to reduce waste in their processes.”
One of the office’s biggest upcoming projects is building a new composting site directly on campus located near the Landscaping Services building.
“One thing that I’m really excited about — and we had a volunteer event about recently — is we’re building a new composting site here,” Brugge said. “And so we’ve had one volunteer event so far to help get the site cleared out. We’re going to have another one here pretty soon.”
Another goal of the office is to pinpoint how much waste the campus produces and what they can do to decrease it.
“We’re planning to do a waste audit on campus,” Brugge said, “And what that looks like is just picking a few select buildings and instead of just throwing away their waste, at the end of the day we’ll collect it over a period of a week, just to figure out, ‘What are we throwing away on this campus?’”
Additionally, the office has many different ways for students to get involved, often involving dorms and living spaces.
“We have a ton of volunteer opportunities,” Brugge said. “One is a garden cleanout that we’re targeting towards the end of this month. We have a garden behind RC South, and there’s a garden club that kind of works towards it. But they always need help, and the Office of Sustainability historically has really helped support them.”
Brugge also highlighted the work that the Office of Sustainability does to assist students academically.
“We also support capstone projects. And so we have a few students in the Honors College who are working with us to do honors capstone projects,” Brugge said.”That’s like where it gets super interesting because the Office of Sustainability by nature, we have to be connected to everything, you know, that’s just kind of like the way that it’s built and the way that it works.”
Along with academic opportunities, the office also offers a variety of internship opportunities through the Green Student Intern program.
“In our office with those (internship) opportunities, we have students from a ton of different diverse backgrounds, which is really great because we need all that educational, like mindset to be able to get the minds together and do things,” Brugge said.
Senior biology and anthropology major Hailey Smith currently works with the Office of Sustainability as an intern. She said her job allows her to contribute to improving ecological infrastructure across campus.
“My title is lead undergraduate student sustainability fellow, and my job is to work on campus ecology, which includes working with different environmental RSOs on campus and trying to collaborate with them and support them,” Smith said. “We’re also trying to work on upgrading and building new campus ecological features, we’re working on the campus garden, and we’re also talking about building some other water features on campus.”
Smith said that interning with the Office of Sustainability has helped her realize the behind-the-scenes processes of sustainability at UM.
“Since I see the inner mechanics of a lot of the things we do, I have a really good intimate understanding of how our processes work on campus and how our partnerships with the city work,” Smith said. “And I think that a lot of students don’t really know what happens with recycling after they throw it in the bin, or they don’t know what happens to the food waste after they toss it or if they go to the Grove and experience that.”
Prior to this year, the office stopped operating due to COVID-19. This year is being treated as a new beginning, starting with the hiring of Brugge in May as the new associate director of sustainability.
“Over the summer, I got brought into the university to rebuild the office,” Brugge said. “And so I’m pretty new here, too. I’ve only been here going on five months, and so we’re getting things going fresh from the ground up.”
Brugge said that their new office is a place to connect people with the environment, as well as each other.
“The new office that we built over here in facilities management is built to kind of be a space that people feel welcome to come to and spend time in because sustainability is by nature a really collaborative thing that’s built around connecting people and making space for new ideas and projects and innovation,” Brugge said.
The Office of Sustainability is working to help the university become a driving factor in Mississippi’s journey toward sustainability.
“We want Ole Miss to be leaders in the state,” Brugge said. “Why not? I mean, we’re positioned to do it. We’ve got the brains, we’ve got the positioning and the influence to make it happen.”
Brugge said that sustainability is more than just taking care of the environment but having a hopeful mindset wherever you go.
“There’s an aphorism that I kind of like.” Brugge said. “It’s kind of goofy, but it’s just ‘every job is a sustainability job.’ You don’t necessarily have to be doing environmental science to help make things better. Wherever you end up, you’re going to have power to make changes and fix broken systems and do things that you find are meaningful. And if we all just did that, then we’d be fine.”
