Planning Checklist

What do you want to achieve by participating in the Campus Race to Zero Waste? Raise awareness with students in the residence halls? Raise the profile of the recycling program with campus decision makers? Draw attention to a new food composting program? Take the time to define one or two primary goals to guide the planning process.

Set a specific challenge or goal(s) that you want students, staff or the entire campus to achieve during the competition. Make sure it achievable during the time frame of the competition. Just because your school may be officially ranked in a multiple categories doesn’t mean you can’t narrow or refocus the specific challenge you communicate publicly. If your school is unlikely to rank highly in the national rankings, consider other ways to frame success. Examples:

• Compete against a specific rival(s) you are competitive against.
• Subgroupings such as other schools within your state or athletic conference.
• Focus on categories you’re most competitive in.
• Compete Against Your Own Record – If beating other school isn't a big motivator, ignore the rankings altogether and frame a challenge around a previous benchmark of your school’s recycling or composting efforts. Example: increase the average amount of recyclables collected by 10% from week one and week eight of the tournament.

The most successful examples of school participation in the Campus Race to Zero Waste comes from those that build teams with stakeholders across campus. Involving students and staff from other areas of campus can help to ensure buy in and support from those areas and be a means to leverage additional resources to promote the school’s involvement. This acts as an advisory group to help plan the campaign and to coordinate their respective department’s involvement supporting the program. Separately, you may have a core team of student volunteers or education staff that is involved in the day to day activities.
Some potential groups to include in your team planning:

• Facilities or physical plant dept.
• Student environmental clubs
• Residence hall council
• Student govt. association
• Dining facilities
• Athletics dept.
• Bookstore

• Develop clear and concise messaging that relays what the competition is, what your campus plans to accomplish and how students/staff can help
• Emphasize positive messages over messages that criticize people for not doing better.
• Don’t automatically lead with the environmental benefits of recycling. Incorporate the economic advantages of recycling, or highlight the many products we use every day that contain recycled content.
• Relate recycling back to your specific school instead of talking about it broadly.
• Coordinate your activities to fit your goals and messaging. For instance, if you’d like to decrease the amount of recyclables ending up in the trash stream, engage in some dumpster diving and do a waste audit in a highly visible area.
• Involve students in crafting the message. They are often full of creative ideas and may even know what will work better than you do.
• Don’t put out all your messaging at the beginning only to let it peter out throughout the competition. Think strategically about timing messages so that your audience maintains interest and becomes curious about what’s coming next.
• Portray recycling as a normalized behavior conducted by everyone. We are social creatures after all and while we may not always admit it, we do like to feel included by participating in what’s popular.

• Utilize the expertise of your school’s communications department to write and distribute a formal press release to both campus and off campus media outlets.
• Come up with trivia and other challenges on to post on social media and see if you can get students to extend the challenge by reaching out to friends at rival campuses.
• Create a dedicated RecycleMania webpage with up to date competition results and provide recycling facts specific to your campus. Or highlight various staff on campus that work on recycling, to bring a human face to the process.
• When planning attention getting activities make sure your campus paper and local media get notified well in advance.
• Take plenty of photos of your events. They serve as an engaging visual story of the competition and promote the idea that recycling is all the rage on campus.
• Reach out to high profile bloggers on your campus to encourage write ups about the competition and spur some friendly taunting with rivals.
• Collaborate with the department that manages the school’s homepage to see if you can get your participation placed in a prominent location during key points of the competition.
• Cozy up to your campus newspaper to see if they would be willing to run a regular weekly column during the Tournament that provides updates on the school’s ranking against your school’s rivals.
• Create scorecards that you can update each week, post around campus bulletin boards and on your website, and on the university cable network.
• Work with Residential Life staff to promote RecycleMania in the residence halls. Distribute flyers to residential advisors to hang on bulletin boards in the residence buildings.
• Work with your communication dept or whoever manages the official school website to see if you can get RecycleMania featured on the homepage during the kickoff or other key promotional time.
• Make napkin holder inserts for dining halls. Change them out each week with update messages and rankings.
• Create slides or short videos about your participation to run on video monitors.
• Create pie chart signs with butcher paper to tape onto dumpsters that show what percentage of trash is recyclable items and a message to recycle more. Get permission to post them.
• Create chalk ads on sidewalks around campus. Get permission to do this first!
• Conduct promotional tabling, hosting recycling-related activities, interactive displays, and prize raffles in the main hall lobbies.

It’s not enough to issue a challenge, you also need to update people on the school’s progress toward achieving it. It’s important to share regular updates to maintain people’s interest and rally them to try harder as you get closer or fall short. And of course, congratulate your audience when they successfully meet the challenge or goal!