Our campus events are creating more waste than we talk about
There is an important difference between simply managing waste and preventing it. It starts with making sustainability a more accessible and shared responsibility between the institution and its students.

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Walk into almost any campus event and you will probably find the same things: food, drinks, promotional materials, decorations, and eventually, a pile of things that need to be thrown away. 

Campus events are an important part of student life. They bring people together, introduce students to new clubs and organizations, and make university feel like more than just lectures and assignments. But behind the music, food, and activities is an environmental cost that can be easy to overlook. 

The University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM) has already recognized this. UTM’s Sustainable Events program provides organizers with guidelines for reducing the environmental impact of their events, including choosing reusable dishes and cutlery, offering vegetarian and vegan options, avoiding unnecessary single-use items, and considering the environmental impact of giveaways and decorations. Event organizers can even complete a sustainability checklist and receive a rating from Bronze to Platinum.    

The guidelines are there. The question is whether having guidelines is enough.

For student organizers, sustainability can become another responsibility added to an already long-event planning checklist. Alongside booking a room, promoting an event, arranging food, and managing a budget, organizers are also expected to think about what happens to every cup, plate, container, and piece of decoration once the event ends—and that just isn’t realistic for students. 

This raises a bigger question: should sustainability depend so heavily on individual students making the right choices?

UTM’s 2025 waste audit found that 14.34% of the material sent to landfill on campus was recyclable material, despite the university already having a recycling program. While this figure is not specific to campus events, it demonstrates a larger problem with relying on disposal and sorting as the final solution. Providing recycling bins is useful, but it does not address the waste that could have been avoided in the first place.     

There is an important difference between managing waste and preventing it.  

For example, asking students to put a disposable cup into the correct recycling bin is better than sending it to landfill. But avoiding the disposable cup altogether is the better option. The same applies to event decorations, food packaging, promotional materials, and other single-use products. 

UTM’s Hospitality and Ancillary Services has already taken steps in this direction. The University works with event clients to determine attendance numbers and expectations in an effort to avoid over-ordering food and creating unnecessary food waste. Some campus dining locations—like Colman Commons and the Davis Building—also use organic waste dehydrators, which are estimated to reduce the amount of organic food output by around 50%. These initiatives show that reducing event waste is possible when sustainability is incorporated into the way an event operates, rather than left entirely to the people attending it. 

The same approach should apply more broadly to student events. 

Instead of expecting every club executive to figure out how to make an event sustainable, UTM could make sustainable options the easiest options available in the first place. Reusable dishes could be the default for catered events where possible. Event planning resources could make waste prevention just as prominent as recycling. Clubs should have easier access to reusable decorations, signage, and event supplies rather than purchasing materials that will only be used once.  

This would also make sustainability more accessible. Not every organizer has the time, knowledge or budget to research the environmental impact of every decision they make. Students are far more likely to choose sustainability if they are more convenient and affordable. 

There is also an opportunity for students to play a role in this process. UTM already has sustainability initiatives that involve student engagement, including programs focused on waste education and sustainable events. Students should absolutely be part of creating a more sustainable campus, but student involvement should complement institutional responsibility, not replace it. 

Campus events are not going to disappear, nor should they. Some amount of waste will inevitably come from bringing hundreds of students together for food, activities, and celebrations. The goal should not be to make every event perfectly waste-free–because, let’s be honest, setting unattainable environmental standards is counter-productive. 

The goal instead should be to stop treating waste as an avoidable part of the experience when some of it can be prevented.

UTM has demonstrated that sustainability is part of its campus priorities. Now, the challenge is to make those priorities more accessible for students—not only by setting sustainable options as the default—but by having critical and honest conversations about the ways in which mainstream sustainability on campus may risk outsourcing institutional responsibility to individual student groups.

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