 My name is Megan Garrity and I'm studying environmental and ecological engineering. I chose to study environmental and ecological engineering here at Purdue because in high school I did some mission trips where I was directly observing the global water crisis happening and I knew that I wanted to pursue a career that would give me the knowledge to benefit those types of communities who go without. That kind of combined with my love for physics and chemistry and just math and science in general in high school led me to want to pursue the Tripoli program when I found out that they offered it here at Purdue. One of my favorite parts of my college experience has been my involvement with the West Lafayette Go Greener Commission. The Purdue Dining Cords send all of their food waste to the wastewater treatment plant. The waste water treatment plant has an anaerobic digester in it and what that digester does is it takes the food scraps and it mixes it with the biosolids that are separated out from the wastewater and that process produces methane and then the wastewater treatment plant burns that methane to produce energy and then the output of that mixing of the food waste and the biosolid is a really rich compost that can then be spread on local farms to reduce the amount of fertilizers and artificial nutrients that need to be put on the agriculture lands. Right now between 2 and 3 tons per day are sent to the digester and it has the capacity to handle somewhere much closer to 18 tons of food waste. We're trying to expand the amount of food waste from the whole community that can be sent to the wastewater treatment plant because that also allows us to power the wastewater treatment plant on this more renewable source of energy which is the food waste rather than needing to burn fossil fuels to power the wastewater treatment plants operations. We've also partnered with Purdue Student Sustainability Council to start a new program where all Greek houses have now the opportunity to send their food waste to the digester and so right now we have eight participating Greek houses and each house sends around 200 to 300 pounds of food waste a week to the digester. I think that this is something that everyone in the community can do to try and collectively work together to make an impact on West Lafayette's goals of reducing our carbon emissions and of being a more sustainable city.