Turn That Brown Upside Down:
A Zero-Waste Project

About This Project

Students in Furman's Environmental Action Group (EAG) seek funding to enhance sustainability efforts on campus by placing receptacles in bathrooms to collect and compost paper towels for the Furman Farm.

Message From The Project Leader

Most of the waste that comes from the bathrooms at Furman is made up of compostable paper towels. Unfortunately, they are being combined with all of the other trash on campus and are sent to landfills. My project is to collect the paper towels in all academic buildings (including the gym and the library) and bring this waste to the Furman Farm to be composted. Since paper towels aren’t the only trash coming from the bathrooms, this project will add an additional trash receptacle in each bathroom for paper-only waste. The goal of this project is to make Furman an even more environmentally sustainable place.

Why Does This Matter?

The paper towel: it seems innocent enough. It doesn’t look like hazardous chemical waste from a lab. It doesn’t resemble plastic, the product notorious for being hard to decompose. But what many don’t know is that when sent to landfills, along with lots of other waste products, paper towels break down and release methane—a greenhouse gas that is 23 times more toxic than carbon dioxide. If most paper towel sections are 11 inches by 5.5 inches, and if every person uses just one paper towel section per day, then the U.S. alone would generate over 304,000 miles of paper towel waste per day! And, during a time when landfill space is diminishing and the negative environmental effects of methane are increasing, we should not be putting these avoidable pressures on the earth.