Meet the Office of Energy and Sustainability student assistants who want to collect your food scraps
Olivia Devito and Viraj Urkudey, leaders of the Office of Energy and Sustainability’s composting program, are on a mission to divert 1,300 pounds of organic waste from local landfills.
Two student assistants, an electric flatbed cart named Sparky, heaps of organic waste and a scale for good measure. Those are the team and tools of Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»â€™s .
The program is part of several Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół» efforts to divert food waste and other organics from a local landfill so they can be converted to energy or fertilizer.
When Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół» offices or departments opt in, they receive an organic waste caddy similar to what some San Diego County residents receive from their trash service providers to dispose of their household organic waste. Bigger producers might graduate to a 5-gallon bucket.
Office of Energy and Sustainability student assistants Olivia Devito and Viraj Urkudey take it from there.
Once a week, Devito and Urkudey load empty buckets into the hauling bed of their four-wheeled friend, Sparky. They take the buckets into participating workspaces and dump office compost bins into the bucket and leave them a clean bin for the following week. After making their rounds, they end up with a load between 15 and 40 pounds. So far this semester, they’ve collected more than 300 pounds of organic waste and they are approaching 1,000 pounds collected since fall 2024.
“A big part of it is education,” said Devito, a third-year sustainability major with a minor in Ecology. “We're really trying to see this expand to a university-wide thing, at least in the sense of getting people to understand what composting is and why it's important. We educate our offices and give them everything they need to be comfortable disposing their waste.”
Part of their education campaign includes posters that detail acceptable organic materials, which can be different from what’s acceptable for compost bins used at home or away from work because different trash providers have different rules. For example, coffee pods marked compost-safe frequently end up in the team’s organic waste collection, but Urkudey and Devito have to fish them out because EDCO, the waste service company that collects Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»â€™s compost, doesn’t accept bioplastics, which are plastics derived from renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.
Open the image full screen.“Composting isn’t a widespread practice yet, so part of what I consider to be my job is to educate and inform people and maybe try and break those habits a little bit,” Devito said. “Most of the time, I find that they're really open to it, even if it's new to them.”
Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»â€™s Associated Students runs its own composting program, as does Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»â€™s Office of Housing Administration.
“A lot of the offices that we service are very passionate about composting, which is great,” said Urkudey, a third-year journalism major and minoring in advertising. “A couple of weeks ago, someone came in and saw me doing the compost, and they started going on about how glad they are that we have a program like this at school. So it was really great to see someone care that we do this and understand how important it is.”
The office composting program started in fall 2022, and as of this spring, 43 different offices, departments or community centers have signed up to participate. In 2023, the College of Arts and Letters building became the first fully participating building at Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół».
Devito and Urkudey said they hope to continue leading the program past the spring semester and to surge past their collection and registration goals. They are also working on making compost bins a regular part of the Thursday farmer’s market in the North Library Quad.
“Olivia and Viraj are great ambassadors for the Office of Energy and Sustainability, and the work they are doing now is laying the foundation for a more connected and sustainability-focused campus community at Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»,” said , sustainability director for the Office of Energy and Sustainability, and Viraj and Olivia’s supervisor.
Urkudey, who grew up compost-minded thanks to his mother and was involved in sustainability efforts all four years in high school, said he sees sustainability as a focal point of his future career, whether he settles on journalism or in the advertising or marketing industries.
Devito said she can see herself getting into nonprofit leadership, or following a science-focused path with her minor in ecology.
“I'm still figuring things out,” she said. “I pretty much live and breathe sustainability. It's definitely going to be a part of my career, wherever I end up.”
The office composting program is one part of Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»â€™s ongoing efforts to comply with California’s SB1383, which mandates the diversion of organic waste from landfills. More information is available on the . Offices can register to participate in the .
