The long-standing sports rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State now includes a quieter competition: which campus manages game-day waste better. After each game, hundreds of student and community volunteers fan out through the stadiums, collecting and sorting trash into recycling and compost streams and turning food scraps and compostable serviceware into soil.
At Michigan, the compost generated on game days is returned to the campus farm and used to grow produce that ends up in stadium concessions. Ohio State’s sustainability program has had notable success: associate director for sustainability Mary Leciejewski says OSU won two national diversion awards last season and diverted roughly 94% of game-day waste from landfills.
Michigan’s athletic facilities director Paul Dunlop highlights the program’s visibility and practical lesson: if you can organize waste for crowds of more than 100,000, you can apply the same practices at home. Students are central to both efforts. At Ohio State, ecology student Meredith Butt helps lead sorting teams and instructs fans on what belongs in recycling and compost bins. At Michigan, sustainability graduate student Mia Terek stresses that dealing with waste is a tangible form of climate action—easier for many people to see than invisible emissions.
Volunteers describe the work as rewarding; being “champions” off the field, they say, matters as much as on it. The rivalry has turned into a friendly environmental contest, with campuses across the country comparing diversion rates each season and celebrating wins both in the stands and at the landfill. As one volunteer put it, this kind of trash talk benefits everyone.
David Schechter reports.