Original article written by Sarah Newman and Stacy Lynn.
Trash.
It’s gross.
It’s not good for people or the planet.
And it’s everywhere — even on sustainability-minded college campuses like Colorado State University.
How can we be a part of the solution to address the trash problem around us?
This is the question the CitSci team at CSU’s Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory asked when the opportunity arose to partner with the nonprofit Leave No Trace to expand their annual #LeaveNoTrash cleanup campaign. The goal was to engage new audiences, encouraging action to reduce waste in everyday spaces.
CitSci is an organization devoted to advancing and supporting participatory science – a term that broadly refers to various ways the public engages in scientific research, including citizen science, community-based monitoring, and community science. The organization develops and maintains the global participatory science platform CitSci.org.
Leave No Trace is a nonprofit organization with a mission to provide innovative education, skills, research, and science to help people care for the outdoors. Instead of relying on costly restoration programs or access restrictions, the organization works with the public and those managing public lands as the most effective and least resource-intensive solution to land protection.
Leave No Trace staff think a lot about trash. After all, Principle #3 of the 7 Leave No Trace Principles is to “Dispose of Waste Properly”. Over the past several years, Leave No Trace has been expanding their 7 Principles programming beyond wilderness environments into more urban spaces.
Once the CitSci and Leave No Trace teams started talking, it wasn’t long before the idea for the #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge was born.
Leave No Trace Principles on Campus
When students arrive at CSU from around the world, they become immersed in the university’s outdoor recreation culture. While recreating, many students are introduced to the 7 Leave No Trace Principles. While these principles are often associated with outdoor recreation, they also have an important role to play at home and around campus.
Principle #3 ties into several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – specifically, Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production).
Because the Leave No Trace Principles are both applicable on campus and help meet Sustainable Development Goals, the obvious next step was to create a project to bring them together with an activity where student actions would contribute to both local and global needs and goals.
#LeaveNoTrash University Challenge
The #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge was developed as a university-centered spinoff of the existing month-long Leave No Trace #LeaveNoTrash campaign. 2024’s week-long event was held during Earth Month (April), and designed to raise awareness of Principle #3 by engaging the campus in a friendly, cross-university challenge to clean up the campus and the community.
The challenge was also inspired by the City Nature Challenge (CNC), an annual global event where cities document as much nature in their community as possible in a week. The CNC began as a friendly competition in 2016 between the Los Angeles Natural History Museum and the California Academy of Sciences, and by 2023 had expanded to include 482 global communities.
The partnership between CitSci and Leave No Trace allowed our CitSci team to design an online project using the CitSci platform for students to engage in the project in a participatory fashion, documenting trash they encountered over the week. The #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge 2024 pilot year event was a competition between CSU, University of Notre Dame, and North Carolina State University to clean up trash around their campus communities.
Bringing the Message Home
The elegance of the #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge is that it supports an aspect of sustainability for CSU that is attainable for nearly everyone, both on and off campus. No matter where or how you live and work, you have the ability to see and document trash (and hopefully pick it up and dispose of it properly). Students and employees who participate see the extent of the waste challenge on campus and in the community, become part of the solution, and are equipped with the tools to spread the message to participate in #LeaveNoTrash wherever they call home.
“I think events like this are important for not only our environment but also our communities. Coming from the east coast where I constantly saw people throwing trash out of their windows while driving, I believe that cleanups similar to this can really help people learn the importance of disposing of their waste properly.”
-Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity Member
“It was really rewarding to see how much waste we picked up, knowing it could’ve been consumed by wildlife or polluting water that will soon be flowing in the ditch. It also makes the green spaces on campus look more maintained, which I think encourages people to spend more time outside!”
-Mary Callaghan, Rainbow Trout President
A StoryMap of Results
CitSci and Leave No Trace received funding for the #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge from the CSU President’s Sustainability Commission in December 2023. The next three months were a frenzy of recruitment and planning for the April launch. In spite of the short timeline, 184 CSU students, staff, and Fort Collins community members participated in our campus cleanup events, totaling 4,950 volunteer hours. All in all, 988 gallons of trash were cleaned and properly disposed of from Colorado State University and surrounding Fort Collins parks and neighborhoods.
Results of the challenge were presented to the President’s Sustainability Commission, which was attended by CSU President Amy Parsons. Results were also presented at the Leave No Trace Global Summit earlier in October.
A dedicated team of students in the Ecosystem Science and Sustainability (ESS) 440 course created a detailed StoryMap to highlight results of the inaugural Challenge. Check them out here:
Leave No Trace also created a Trash Quiz from the results of the challenge and sent it out to all of their newsletter subscribers.
Join the 2025 #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge
A buzz has begun about a 2025 #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge. We want to leverage the momentum from the first event into a global annual event with a big tent, as the City Nature Challenge has done.
SciStarter, a major player in the participatory science space, has signed on to help CitSci and Leave No Trace recruit additional universities to participate, including several that expressed interest after last year’s event. We’d also love to engage our colleagues at CSU SPUR Campus as well as our Extension colleagues around the state. If you’re interested in participating, reach out to Sarah Newman at sarah.newman@colostate.edu.
Project Support
The inaugural #LeaveNoTrash University Challenge was funded through a combination of resources, including Leave No Trace and a Colorado State University Sustainability Award from the President’s Sustainability Commission. Faculty mentors from ESS 440 and the CitSci team, leaders from ASCSU and the President’s Sustainability Commission, and over 180 volunteers were instrumental to the success of the project. Thank you!
