Game Day Litter and the Fight for a Greener U-M
Students’ role in campus waste and U-Michigan’s sustainability initiatives
—By Sara Bernardo
It’s a Sunday morning, and University of Michigan senior, Ruchi Shah, starts her day by calculating the damage done outside from the parties the day and night before. Walking outside in their pajamas, she and her roommates grab trash bags and remove solo cups and cans from their cars in their parking lot, in front of their house, and ensure none of their outdoor tables got damaged. Shah lives on Tappan Ave, a popular senior-year residential location cornered between many fraternities and tailgate locations.
“Every home game, drunk students always wander through yards, throwing cans and red solo cups on the ground, especially if the cops are nearby,” says Shah, explaining how their house collects waste. “Our parking lot also shares a fence with a fraternity, and people will throw their bottles, cans, and solo cups over the tarp and onto our cars. It has even dented the top of one of my roommate’s cars!” Shah and her roommates dislike cleaning others’ messes but accept it as part of college life.
University of Michigan has a very prevalent social life and houses about 52,000 students. Trash inevitably accumulates from the high foot traffic on campus, but student mindsets also hinder the school’s sustainability goals.
Student behavior
According to Jessica Finlay of Queen’s University, university and college campuses often are microcosms of the broader challenges facing North American towns and cities. Generation Z, the majority of the college student population “are often called the ‘green generation,’” says Moonhee Cho, a professor at the University of Tennessee, as they are eco-conscious and open to green products and services. However, this label may not tell the full story.
For instance, in 2018, seven home games at Michigan Stadium generated 73.48 tons of waste (that’s about 12 elephants). Beyond the stadium, littering remains pervasive closer to campus. “Littering is rampant at UM,” says Alyssa Levy, University of Michigan senior and former sustainability chair of her sorority. “When drinking and tailgating, kids tend to just discard their trash everywhere because they assume at some point it will get buried, blow away, or some mysterious force comes and whisks it away.”
While recycling is one of the most effective strategies to better the environment, Cho’s research found that young people, despite their willingness to pay extra for goods from sustainably committed companies, are least likely to engage in recycling behavior. So how come young adults will put more effort into less-effective strategies to serve the environment?
Shah’s first thoughts were convenience and peer influence. In areas with fewer trash cans, most students seem unwilling to take a five-ten minute detour to properly dispose of their waste. Peer behavior also plays a significant role. Shah says, “When you already see trash on the ground, it almost makes it seem normal to just drop your cup before going to the game or leaving a tailgate house.”
Levy believes it comes from apathy and lack of awareness. “With littering, people don’t see or experience the consequences of their actions, so it perpetuates. If the trash just piled up and kids had to walk by it not just on a Saturday game day but every morning on their walk to class, they might feel differently about it.” Convincing students of the connection between their littering and larger environmental issues remains a challenge.
A community effort toward sustainability
As a result of student behavior, the University of Michigan has to work harder. Although the U-M grounds department does not clean Hill Street or off-campus residential areas, wind often carries student-generated trash onto campus property. Rob Doletzky, the University of Michigan’s director of landscaping management, has personally observed an uptick in student waste on the streets, with East Quad, South Quad, and Ross producing the most from student tailgates. His maintenance team, which previously cleaned the grounds of Ross and other areas of campus 3 times a week, now have to manage trash daily. Although residential halls compensate the grounds team for their additional labor, cleaning the campus buildings such as Ross comes out of the landscaping department’s budget. This highlights the strain student behavior places on university resources, displaying the need for collective responsibility and programs to keep the campus clean.
Doletzky also referenced a new initiative the University of Michigan is trialing to turn game day waste into compost. Doletzky’s department collects trash blown onto residential halls and Ross from the student tailgates, transports them to the Botanical gardens, sorts, and combines them with collected leaf debris to produce compost. This compost is accumulated in the Botanical gardens and used as compost for their gardens and the land on campus. The University started this initiative with one gameday last year, four game days this year, and Doletzky is hopeful that it will be used for every game day next year and beyond. Although the amount of trash saved from landfills through this initiative is unknown, Doletzky is very excited about the future.
In cooperation with many other offices across U of M, the Office of Sustainability is close to completing 80% of its 2025 Ann Arbor campus sustainability goals. Currently, U-M has over 1,100 compost bins on campus including in all residential halls and 22 on-campus cafes. Despite their large student body and dynamic student and city life, the University of Michigan has created large strides in sustainability.
Ann Arbor residents also contribute to aid the game day waste. Father Gabriel Richard High School, about 20 minutes from the Michigan stadium, provides hundreds of volunteers who clean the Big House after game days according to Ryan Stanton, journalist at the MLive. Organizer Cindy Pressprich says that each clean up takes about 2 hours, as volunteers move pizza, bottles, and other items down 100 rows of seats. They sort waste into recyclables, trash, and compost following the guidelines displayed on the stadium’s jumbo scoreboards, and typically finishing by 9:30 am (before most students wake up).
On Saturday, fans dispose of about 50% of the total waste, though many fail to use the specific bins correctly. This results in contamination, says Paul Dunlop, Michigan’s associate athletic director interviewed in the article. Severe contamination can divert the entire supply of recycling or compost to the landfill instead of its sustainable original destinations. Volunteers correct these mistakes by re-sorting compost bins and properly sorting the remaining 50% of trash, lessening the amount of contamination and landfill contributions.
The volunteers also serve as “the dumpster police”on game days to ensure large bags of waste are thrown into the correct dumpsters, explains Mike Lollo, Michigan Stadium’s facilities manager. Their efforts are vital for keeping the stadium clean for future events while also helping the University reach its sustainability goals. By 2025, the University is hoping to reduce 90% of the amount of waste going to the landfill, a milestone achieved only once in 2017. Currently, the stadium diverts 75% of its waste away from landfills, but reaching zero waste remains challenging. Dunlop believes that zero waste is unachievable at the Big House since there is so much non-recyclable packing, but they are optimistic they can reduce more waste in the future.
In return for their efforts, the University pays the Father Gabriel Richard High School in the form of a fundraiser. The high school uses the University funds towards their general operating budget, effectively lowering the tuition for all of their students. This type of mutually beneficial partnership is common for the University of Michigan and exemplifies its commitment to sustainability, as it frequently collaborates closely with student-run labs, organizations, and studies to advance its environmental initiatives.
University life and sustainability
Despite external efforts, even the very structure of college life induces an environmentally harmful mentality. The fast-paced campus lifestyle and the prevalence of single-use items like coffee cups and wrappers contribute to improper waste disposal. High student turnover each year further exacerbates the issue, as the transient population feels less accountable for their long-term environmental impact. Michigan college towns produce “mountains of waste” each spring during move-out periods, as the majority of students do not remain in one housing location for more than one year.
According to As Bridge, “Michigan produces more landfill garbage per resident than anywhere else in the country,” highlighting the need for alternative waste management. It can be a challenging balance to not only counteract the damage student life enacts on the environment, but also innovate and create a more sustainable system on such a large scale. The University of Michigan has been at the forefront of this struggle for many years, especially through its use of collaborations with other organizations, including House N2 Home.
According to Gabrielle Nelson, a writer at Bridge Michigan, House N2 Home is an organization that takes donated items from college move out each spring to furnish homes for people exiting homelessness. Currently, House N2 Home partners with the U-M Office of Campus Sustainability, the city of Ann Arbor, and multiple sororities and high-rise student apartment buildings to keep usable furniture out of the dumpsters each spring. Jesse Krugel, a graduating U-M film student said that House N2 Home was the “easiest, most affordable option for moving out.” They take your items free of charge and handle all of the transportation and moving fees. This service is especially helpful for students stressed with finals who don’t have time to sell their items on platforms like Facebook Marketplace or eBay.
Last year, House N2 Home furnished 352 homes for 740 people in Washtenaw County, using furniture and appliances diverted from the landfills. Through this initiative, perfectly usable items get saved from the landfill and reused by people who need them. For those receiving donations, this process can be life-changing. After handing over the keys to an empty apartment, recipients return a few hours later to find it “100% furnished,” a gesture that transforms lives but also helps reduce the environmental footprint of the campus community in the process.
Students take action
Some students like Katie Kinney and Emma Bilgreen, co-founders of Clean Up Campus, are defying the stereotype through their volunteer-based club. Clean Up Campus was created in March of 2024 after seeing trash throughout campus, and started doing clean-up events in September 2024. Kinney and Bilgreen said that they wanted to create a heavily volunteer-based club that focused on tangible results. Kinney and Bilgreen agree with Levy that most students do not care to pick up trash themselves, so weekly they do a clean-up at a new location. As of December 2024, they have cleaned up the Arb, medical campus, and fields on and off campus and have removed 237.7 pounds of trash. Bilgreen and Kinney emphasized the importance of picking up “even the small trash” such as cigarette butts on the medical campus and waste in parking lots. As the weather gets colder, Kinney and Bilgreen plan to do more educational outreach, continue their monthly grocery bag drives, and future efforts for reusable coffee cups across the University of Michigan cafes.
Similarly, Levy also referenced an additional volunteer event run by Michigan’s Kappa Delta that cleans the day after Winterfest, the yearly fundraiser run by Michigan greek life. Although Winterfest raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity ($227,000 in 2023), it also produces a lot of waste around the streets of Oxford Rd. The rampant littering taking place at this event sometimes clogs the street so badly that people cannot drive out of their driveways. Levy worked with Michigan Kappa Delta and garnered a large group to help clean all of the trash the following day in the February cold. Levy hopes to help support and create additional projects similar to this for game days and other big events such as Hashbash.
Motivating the student body to change attitudes toward littering and sustainability, especially on alcohol-fueled game days, can be challenging. However, efforts by students like Levy, organizations such as Clean Up Campus, and the University of Michigan’s sustainability initiatives offer hope for a cleaner future. As Doletzky puts it, ‘We’re just scratching the surface with these new programs, and it’s exciting to envision how they’ll elevate sustainability at the University of Michigan to the next level.”