The program to reduce Stanford’s waste starts with common practices, such as recycling printer paper or turning off the water when you brush your teeth.

But recycling the food you were too full to eat? Stanford does that too.

At all campus dining halls, “scraps off of student plates as well as kitchen preparation food waste, produce, meat, soiled paper and napkins can be composted,” says Erin Gaines, Sustainable Foods Coordinator for Stanford Dining.

Newby Island in Milpitas, in addition to being Stanford’s landfill, does double duty as a destination for compostables. Peninsula Sanitary Service, Inc. (PSSI) trucks organic waste from campus compost bins to the landfill’s composting center, where large mounds of yesterday’s lunches and dinners slowly decompose.

After some lucky employee decides that sufficient rotting has taken place, PSSI trucks make another trip to Newby Island, returning with a rich soil amendment used in campus landscaping.

Stanford’s composting program started at Wilbur in 2003 and expanded to all dining halls the following year. Several other locations now practice behind-the-counter composting, including the Business School cafe, the golf course restaurant and the faculty dining club. Row houses also compost their organic waste, though it’s kept in locked bins to avoid contamination from well-meaning (but inexpert) passers-by.

While on-campus composting is largely a behind-the-scenes activity, those involved say it has great potential. But the road has not been completely smooth.

“Stanford Dining tried to roll out biocompostables in all the cafes [last year],” said Dawn Kwan ‘09, co-leader of Students for a Sustainable Stanford’s Zero Waste Committee. “We had volunteers in bright green T-shirts standing in Tresidder for a whole week, directing people.”

But when she returned to campus this fall, “we realized that everything had returned to Styrofoam,” she said. “They took away the compost bins and the signages and that just confused people.”

Kwan is working with Gaines and PSSI waste manager Julie Muir to try again, making helpful signs and gathering volunteers to inform cafe patrons.

“We’re pushing out biocompostables in Olive’s and in Alumni [Cafe],” Kwan says. She hopes to complete the project within the quarter.

Currently, 39 percent of Stanford’s waste is landfilled at Newby Island. Muir’s goal is to reduce that to 24 percent through more recycling and to 14 percent by expanding composting efforts.

“You get [that] by educating people,” Muir says. “What’s left in the garbage? What are students buying that we can’t recycle?”

That’s a key question, considering the scope of Stanford’s waste management. It’s also a question perfectly suited to that eco-conscience deep inside us all: what did you throw in the trash today?