By: Cameron Shultz

Craig Biersdorff is a hazardous waste specialist at the University of Oregon’s Department of Environmental Health and Safety. He has worked at the University for twelve years, and brings many additional years of experience in analytical chemistry to the job.

Craig Biersdorff checks on the chemical inventory he keeps available for faculty and students.

What types of waste material does the University primarily collect?

The majority of our most hazardous materials come from laboratories. But we also collect waste from Facilities [Campus Operations]. For example: The auto shop has used oil or used gasoline fuel cleaners. We have used paints that Facilities uses throughout campus, or cleaning materials. The architecture department generates a fair amount of waste in their sculpture and metals, and things like that.

So you need the reports from these departments. Are they generally reliable in this regard?

Yeah, because they know what’s required in terms of what they can throw away and what needs to be collected. And so, they do that regularly; they don’t let it build up, because there’s something in regulations that dictates how soon that material has to be disposed of. The whole idea is to prevent contamination to the environment. So the sooner we get it out of here to the proper channels, the better.

What steps are being taken to promote reduction and recycling?

One of our biggest obstacles is we don’t have central purchasing. That means that every person, every department, can order most chemicals on their own, and so there’s a lot of inventory that are duplicates or triplicates of things. One of our goals is to list the inventory of different labs that users can access and say, “Oh, we’ve got this in stock, we don’t need to order this now.” Or, through our chemical share and reuse facility, they can say, “Well someone in another lab has this and, since I just want to try a small portion of it, instead of me going and buying a bottle of it I can borrow some from the lab.” We also encourage reducing their experiments down in size and volume – to use up their chemicals so they don’t have things left over. Of course, there are the green laboratories here on campus that are switching gears and trying to produce classes and labs that use more green friendly chemicals.

Would you say these have been effective? What needs improvement?

 I think we can improve in all those areas. I mean, they’re somewhat effective, but there’s a tendency for old researchers to continue to do things the way they’ve always done them, and they don’t want to make changes. So we’re always kind of at battle.

Audio sample from interview with Craig Biersdorff: