As people on campus seek out coffees, teas and other hot drinks to warm them up as temperatures dip, they may notice new signage when they go to toss their cups in the bin.
Dalhousie began rolling out a new set of campus waste-sorting signage during Sustainability Month this October, the first major update to this information in a decade.
Stephanie MacPhee, executive director of Dalhousie’s Office of Sustainability, says lessons learned over the past 10 year were incorporated into the redesigned signage.
“We have updated the signage based on what we know is the most effective and best practices that we know of, and what other institutions have done and found to be effective,” she says.
We have updated the signage based on what we know is the most effective and best practices that we know of.
Signs are being introduced in a phased approach above waste-sorting stations, with residences in Halifax and on Truro Campus being the first areas targeted. Signage will then be rolled out across other parts of Dal’s campuses.
MacPhee expects the process to be completed by the end of the term.
Updates have also been made to campus waste-sorting guides that provide more detailed overviews on waste reduction and operational rules for residences, administrative units, labs, and food retail spaces. These guides and all new signage can be found online on the Office of Sustainability’s Sharepoint Page.
Stephanie MacPhee.
Making sorting simpler
While Dal has maintained its overall approach to sorting waste into four streams — paper, recycling, organics, and garbage (PROG) — it has adopted a far more explicit visual language to convey sorting requirements.
Signage above bins now includes more real images of key items allowed in each bin, with limited text and bright and colourful tones to ensure clarity. The information also states what items do not belong in each bin (but are routinely misplaced), an approach to help avoid cross-contamination that causes extra sorting work by Facilities Management's waste management team.
Disposable single-use cups are among the most difficult items when it comes cross contamination on campus, says MacPhee.
She says people often get confused since these cups can be recycled off campus, in accordance with the province’s new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) guidelines that rolled out last December. At Dal, these cups continue to be garbage. Lack of capacity has prevented some large-scale businesses and institutions from participating in the new EPR sorting rules.
Shown above right: Single-use cups often end up in the wrong bins on campus. (Jonathan Cooper photo/Pexels)
Relatedly, Dal's news signs and guides also emphasize that people should not place containers with liquid in them in bins. The liquid can contaminate recyclables and makes custodial jobs harder by weighing down bags and creating more messes.
Area-specific signage are also being planned as part of the initiative. For example, food-specific sorting posters will be found near Tim Hortons and other on-campus food vendors. Lab areas will get their own specific sorting guides.
Student research sparks change
MacPhee attributes some of these changes to student-led research.
A team of five students — Amber Salter, Bridget McPhail, Jaime Mason, Naomi Noseworthy, and Owen Rutherford — explored the influence of signage on waste-sorting accuracy in a paper for a Dalhousie course on environmental problem solving.
What they discovered was that the most effective method to increase accuracy was using informative lists of correct and incorrect items with “easily interpretable instructions.”
“It was a really, really great project,” says MacPhee, noting that they won the ‘Excellence in Science Communication Award’ at the recent SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) Expo in March 2026 for their poster presentation based on their research.
You may think as an individual, it doesn't really matter, but it actually does.
MacPhee says their research inspired her team to get the signage finished “sooner rather than later” and influenced aspects of the designs, which were done in-house by Jill Caldwell on Dal’s Creative Studio team.
Of the three Rs (“reduce, reuse, and recycle”), MacPhee says reduce can make the biggest difference as it influences choices before waste is produced.
“You may think as an individual, it doesn't really matter, but it actually does,” she says.“If you think about the 20,000 students on campus and even the number of staff, every time we substitute a single-use item for a reusable item that kind of collective impact really does add up.”