December 2025

December 2025

Inside the Newsletter:

Interview with Ahnika Seifert | Environmental Project | Events | Funding Opportunities

Q&A with Ahnika Seifert: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Commercial Composting

Headshot of Ahnika smiling in a black suit jacket with a green shirt underneath. In late October, MnTAP staff members had a conversation with Ahnika Seifert, the Recycling Coordinator at the Waste Recovery Services program at the University of Minnesota (UMN), on composting and recycling. More information on this program can be found at the UMN’s website.

In this Q&A, Ahnika shares insights on what businesses and organizations can learn from UMN’s success in creating and maintaining robust composting and recycling systems. Read on to discover more about how to get started on the journey to achieve zero waste and reduce your environmental impact as well as how waste reduction can be a gateway to strengthening your workplace culture and commitment to environmental stewardship.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

What does UMN’s compost recycling program look like, and how did it develop?

Ahnika is holding a green sign with a recycling symbol in a room full of paper bales. The image has the text, "Como Recycling Facility: Paper Bales Ready for Market," and on the bottom right is a white circle with a maroon recycling symbol and the text, "University of Minnesota Recycling Programs." Before I dive into talking about compost recycling, it’s good to know that the UMN Twin Cities’ waste program is pretty unique, even compared to other universities relying on city and private haulers. UMN initially adopted its waste program to help with logistics of transporting materials out of the 260 buildings and more effectively consolidating that waste at our Material Recovery Facility – Como Recycling Facility or MRF. We operate a self-managed waste system, meaning we actually run our own fleet of collection vehicles that travel to loading docks and consolidation points across campuses before transporting all materials to MRF. MRF then sends its processed materials to secondary processors or end markets.

We primarily work with biowaste, bulky items, and even small construction debris from renovations along with traditional recyclables. We also operate a ReUse warehouse that diverts thousands of usable items each year, and more information can be found on this UMN website. I wanted to provide this general background on why and how we are able to do a lot, but that doesn’t mean that a business would be excluded from having these same abilities.

Scaling back to inside a building and how waste is being sorted and disposed, it is worth noting that most households are using single-stream recycling, which means everything goes into one bin. Here on campus, much of our success can be attributed to our standardized dual-stream, “Quad System.” The four parts include:

  1. Paper that is separated from other recyclables.
  2. Mixed recycling that includes glass and metal.
  3. Plastic has its own bin.
  4. Waste

Further separating what can be recycled helps to preserve the quality of the recyclables, so we can actually recycle more of them.

The Quad System has been in place since the 1980s. It was started by my predecessor, who was here for 30 years. In the beginning, we actually had no recycling on campus, and he was like, “Well, I’ll put a bin here and here. And I’ll take the newspaper and paper. We’ll use this consolidation location on our campus at Como.” We started by hand sorting all that material, and this later developed into the current four-bin system.

Important Terms

Waste composition study: A review of what materials are being disposed of. It can be a study on all waste or just what do people recycle versus trash. These typically include digging through the trash, sorting it, and seeing what in there could have been recovered through traditional recycling or composting. It gives insight on why certain locations have their current recycling rates, where are areas to improve in the waste system, and what are solutions (e.g., more education or better bins) to make it easier for people to follow composting and recycling more consistently.

Zero waste: Around 90% recovery, and this means only 10% of items need to be landfilled or incinerated.

When it came to composting, we attacked most of our high compost generators in weight in the early 2000’s. This includes composting in kitchen spaces and animal beddings, which generate high volumes of waste that we didn’t want to throw away as trash.

After this initial composting and factoring out recycling, we knew that our waste compositions was made up of 50% compostable items due to carrying out many waste composition studies. It costs us more money to dispose of it as trash ($100/ton) than to compost ($25/ton). We ended up being successful in making our case with the UMN Board of Regents for composting being available everywhere and centralized collection as these would save money, improve diversion rates, and be the best environmental choice.

We also felt it was an equity issue. Composting shouldn’t be accessible only for some. It’s nice because I can pitch that, “We have the ability to be zero waste in any corner of the campus now.”

Composting was added everywhere on campus in 2018 and continues to deliver strong recovery rates. This expansion covered the residence halls, office buildings, and academic spaces. It has been helpful for our recovery rates.

Recently, we reached our zero-waste goal at the Farm Aid concert at the Huntington Bank Stadium. For some context, we have been 20% to 40% away from reaching zero waste, or that 90% benchmark, for a good decade. With this 2025 football season, we’ve been narrowing down to just two or three percent points off at every football game. Before the Farm Aid concert, we invested in some better recycling containers for the public and were able to finally accomplish our goal. It probably helped that there was a lot of compostable materials to help offset whatever still needed to end up in the trash.

On average, we manage 1,331 tons of compostable materials annually. Since we have so much of it, we are actually sending a lot to Dakota Prairie, which is owned and operated by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community in Jordan, Minnesota. We go there pretty much daily.

Finally, we also compost yard waste, like trees and grass clippings, on our St. Paul campus that amounts to roughly 100 tons per year.

What information or advice can you give to a company or organization that does not have the capacity to compost themselves?

We acknowledge that most people don’t have the ability to transport materials or have access to their own composting sites. If you are located within the Twin Cities metro area, your compost is being sent to the Dakota Prairie Composting or the Specialized Environmental Technologies in Rosemount. The State of Minnesota regulates where your materials are hauled to based on your location. A lot of materials are being commingled at a transfer station at Brooklyn Park, so from a business standpoint, you probably don’t have to worry about where your materials go to as that is something your hauler will take care of.

I would advise businesses to use a commercial hauler that offers to bring your materials to the appropriate site for composting. Although not all haulers are doing it, if you live within Hennepin County, it’s actually a requirement for haulers to provide that service.

You will need to budget for that added expense because they will charge you for picking up that material. There might be an economic argument that if you are composting, then you will generate much less trash and might need a smaller trash dumpster.

If you are located outside the metro area or the Duluth area, access to composting sites can be more difficult. If you want composting services, then you should connect with local waste haulers and advocate for access to composting. It is a simple supply and demand issue. If you don’t ask for it, those markets aren’t going to form.

The State of Minnesota is deeply invested in establishing industrial composting outside of the metro area. There has been quite a bit of investment just to have the capacity to establish those two to support businesses, organizations, and residents in the metro area. Greater Minnesota is definitely a space the State wants to expand composting services in. And honestly, I’m finding composting sites in Greater Minnesota that are more ready and eager to take on additional material.

Would it be a good idea for businesses and organizations to do a waste composition study?

This is a good idea for businesses and organizations that are looking to reduce their waste and are already recycling traditional recyclables. If you’re not composting, around 45 to 60 percent of your trash stream is likely made up of compostable materials. While your waste streams may shift depending on your business, we at the UMN find that our waste composition studies lead to pretty consistent results in how much is compostable. There is a lot of compostable material left in the trash by weight, even if this material might look small volume wise.

In addition, some jurisdictions will require you to have a composting system if you generate a large amount of compostable material, and your business falls into certain categories, like grocery stores and restaurants. For instance, Hennepin County requires many businesses that handle food and either “generate one ton or more of trash per week” or “contract for eight cubic yards or more of trash service per week” to recycle food waste by donating, converting to food for animals, composting, or pursuing other methods approved by the county.  Learn more about this ordinance and helpful tips on how to follow it from this Hennepin County online guide.

I imagine it takes a lot of encouragement to change how people produce and dispose of waste they cannot avoid. What type of strategies have worked in helping people reduce and dispose of their waste correctly?

I don’t find that to be true actually. Most of the materials we generate are either compostable or recyclable. Very few items are truly non-recoverable. What really changes behavior is making sure the tools that we provide are genuinely helpful.

In the waste world, the most important tool is your infrastructure, such as the bins themselves. The way people sort their waste depends heavily on how those bins are set up. A few key principles guide our approach:

Lesson From the Field

By installing new waste containers at the football stadium, “we’ve made it so easy and accessible to recycle and compost. We’ve actively made trash a challenge to use because it’s a smaller compartment, it’s uglier, and it’s a darker color. And even without any education, we see a 75% diversion rate.”

  • Pair all waste streams together. Recycling, compost, and trash should always be side by side and follow the same order to make it easier to use across different parts of the campus.
  • Make composting and recycling easier than trash. For example, make the trash compartment smaller or less accessible. And because I knew my waste stream would comprise mostly of recyclables and compostables, I made those the largest and easiest to use.
  • Choose materials that are easy to identify as compostable or recyclable. On our campus, all single-use items are required to be compostable, which makes proper disposal much simpler for all. In Minnesota, the upcoming EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) regulations will help even more by ensuring that products are designed to be recyclable or compostable from the start. Remember that as a business or organization, you have the ability to tightly control what materials you’re putting out there that your employees and customers will eventually discard.
  • Move away from single-use items where possible. We can prevent waste entirely by providing reusables instead of disposables, even compostable ones. This is the most effective and foolproof way to reduce waste.

As the Campus Recycling Coordinator, I’d actually like to see less recycling overall because recycling isn’t the solution to our waste problem; it’s just the backup.

What challenges did you face in rolling out this program, and how did you learn to address them?

Contamination was our biggest challenge early on. Compost streams often included recyclables or non-compostable packaging, especially when multiple types of packaging were used on campus. We’re pretty strict about how clean our compost is as we’re only permitted to go to one compost site, and we don’t want to be kicked out of there. Once the UMN had a requirement for certified compostable products on campus, that fixed the contamination issue, but this was our first, real hurdle.

The next challenge was maintaining consistency across a large, decentralized campus. We addressed that by creating standardized waste station designs, signage templates, visual guides, and communication toolkits that each department could use. While getting initial buy in was never an issue, handling the logistics to ensure standards are consistently followed continues to be challenging.

Over time, we found the following strategies to be effective in helping people on campus adhere to recycling, composting, and throwing away their trash correctly:

  • Performing waste infrastructure audits annually. Students and staff visit the 260 buildings on our campus once a year to see how the tools, like bins, that make up the infrastructure are being used, and if they are following standards that we know equals better recycling and diversion rates. We need to ensure that the tools we provide for students, staff, and the public are consistently effective, easy to use, and accessible across the UMN.
  • Making it harder to separate recycling, composting, and trash bins. For the football stadium, the new containers we bought are actually a cabinet of the three bins that can’t be separated any longer. [This helps ensure all three options are available whenever someone is looking to dispose of an item, which increases diversion rates and decreases contamination.] Since they’ve been so successful, we’re planning to use the same system for the rest of the UMN because the current bins in our quads and elsewhere are still individual containers. This means the bins can move quite often and prove challenging to maintain.
  • Using science to encourage people to compost and recycle more. Having something at eye level makes it clearer to individuals what trash goes where even in high-paced, high-traffic environments, like sports stadiums. Colors carry behavioral connotations, such as blue for recycling and green for composting. Even though the UMN’s recycling program uses different colors, the State of Minnesota strongly encourages all to follow these color standards if possible.
  • Training individuals once you have established effective tools and infrastructure. Ultimately, cultural and true behavioral change should be thought of as a pyramid. At the bottom, there are the tools you provide to encourage success. Just above that layer, and the next step chronologically, is building people’s skillsets. We have done a lot of studies where we see a much better recycling rate after coming in and educating people. Five or ten-minute conversations on how people think about composting and recycling are the best. Challenges, such as competitions between individuals or groups, are great at building traction after you’ve developed a strong foundation of tools and skillsets.

Lesson From the Field

“Even a five-minute conversation about waste gets people’s minds thinking.”

“I’ve been at laboratories that had no recycling and with just one champion saying, “We want to do better.” We came in and brought them the proper tools. And then, they were all educating each other about what goes where, and it became very much a thing.”

The last thing to build in that pyramid is creating a zero-waste culture from our daily routines to standard procedures. I think companies want opportunities to build culture and a strong sense of belonging to their workplace. Collectively working to reduce waste can be a great way to achieve that.

What are some common misconceptions around setting up a compost recycling program that you would like to address?

People always assume, “Oh, it’s disgusting. It’s gross.” But actually, trash has always been there. It was just not in the right container.

I also like sharing that composting is the single best thing you can do today to reduce your environmental impact. When compost goes into the landfill, it releases methane gas. Methane is 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas emitter than carbon. If you’re looking to reduce your footprint, composting is a really great thing to do. Composting also returns nutrients to our depleted soil.

Finally, I see composting or having conversations on waste as a gateway to broader sustainability engagement on our campus. In contrast to waste, when you talk about energy and water, those can be more abstract and harder to understand. But paying attention to waste and composting helps build awareness and foster stronger consciousness about your impact on the world.

Lesson From the Field

“Waste is so personal to people. It’s physical and easy to see what can be compostable, reusable, or recyclable.”

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?

I sometimes say, “If you build it, they will come.” The fear of, “Should we do it all,” can be paralyzing. Just start small and build it up. I think working towards zero waste shouldn’t be a big, dramatic thing. It’s 2025, let’s get going.

In conclusion, MnTAP staff are here to support any businesses or organizations interested in applying the lessons learned from Ahnika in their own pursuit of zero waste or reducing the amount of waste being sent to the landfill or incinerated. Waste composition studies, waste infrastructure audits, and education on composting and recycling are strategies that MnTAP staff work on every day with companies and organizations across Minnesota, and there are always MnTAP staff available to carry out site visits and consultations. All MnTAP staff services are confidential, at no cost, and non-regulatory. When more in-depth assistance is needed, the MnTAP intern program provides extended, hands-on assistance for a nominal cost share. To learn more, access this MnTAP intern webpage for businesses and organizations.

Authors

Logan Wikstrom – Associate Engineer
  wikst043@umn.edu
612-624-0808

Jocelyn Leung – Communications Specialist

Building a Business Case for Environmental Project Ideas and Calculating Payback Period

A scale that one side has a globe with a leaf on top of it and on the other side two stacks of coins.

All ideas are good ideas, but not all projects are created equally. That is why including an estimated payback period, or how long it would take to recoup the costs of implementing a project, from the start is key. A frequent challenge for sustainability leaders is maintaining engagement with passionate employees while balancing the financial and environmental priorities of the organization.

To help bridge this gap, MnTAP developed a one-page Sustainability Project Scoping Worksheet with the following sections:

  1. A section that walks the user through the scoping process where the user can briefly describe their project and list key project stakeholders.
  2. A reference table that lays out the average costs per functional unit of waste, water, and energy (WWE) based on 2025 data that MnTAP staff use.
  3. A table that helps the user estimate the WWE (or determine how much an organization could save on each resource each year) and factor in the staff time needed to implement the project.
  4. A table to consider potential sources of cost for project implementation, such as cost of new equipment or operating costs.

After completing all these sections, the worksheet will then auto-calculate the estimated payback period for the project in number of years. This worksheet can be downloaded from this MnTAP webpage.

While each organization’s prioritization of projects will differ depending on their ideal payback period, MnTAP has found that projects with a payback period of 2 years or less tend to be viewed more favorably. Additionally, organizations that adopt sustainability as a core value in their operations may accept longer payback periods that align with their environmental goals.

With this worksheet, employees who are passionate about the environment can formulate and articulate their project ideas in a simple manner without omitting necessary details. Worksheets like this can help employees build an appealing business case for their project ideas and prepare them to guide honest, productive conversations with their organizations and workplaces.

Contact

Logan Wikstrom – Associate Engineer
  wikst043@umn.edu
612-624-0808

Events

Smart Salting: Parking lots and sidewalks certification training
MPCA

Event 1: December 18, 2025, 8:30 AM – 2:00 PM at Prairie Island Community Center & Health Clinic Building, 1158 Island Lake Blvd Welch, MN 55089

Event 2: January 7, 2026, 8:00 AM – 1:30 PM at Walker Area Community Center, 105 Tower Ave, Walker, MN 56484

Event 3: January 14, 2026, 8:30 AM – 2:00 PM at Eden Prairie Community Center, 16700 Valley View Road, Eden Prairie, MN 55346

No Cost

Audience: Private winter maintenance companies and city park, hospital, and school winter maintenance professionals. Participants will learn how to integrate science with practical winter maintenance while minimizing impacts on the environment. Upon completion of training and passing the test issued at the end of training, you will earn a Smart Salting certification that expires five years from the date of training. Register online.

Packaging Waste and Cost Reduction Act Draft Assessment
MPCA

December 18, 2025, 2:00 – 3:00 PM

Virtual, No Cost

The Packaging Waste and Cost Reduction Act (Minn. Stat. § 115A.144-115A.1463) creates an extended producer responsibility (EPR) program for packaging and paper products statewide. EPR policies incentivize more sustainable design and hold producers responsible for reducing the environmental impacts of the items they produce and managing these items throughout the entire life cycle.  Under the law, the MPCA is required to complete a preliminary assessment in 2025 and a needs assessment in 2026. The two assessments will gather critical information about packaging and paper product introduction, use and reuse, and management in Minnesota that will inform the development of the program statewide. The first of these two reports, the preliminary assessment is posted for public comment. At this meeting, you will hear a short presentation on the draft report and have an opportunity for questions and make a public comment on the draft report. MPCA website with information on this informational meeting and how to join on Teams.

Funding Opportunities