New Voices

Coryanne Mansell

Former strategic partnership coordinator at the Center for EcoTechnology

Coryanne Mansell joined the Center for EcoTechnology (CET), Northampton, Massachusetts, shortly after graduating from Rutgers University in 2015 and has been there for eight years. She initially began working for the organization through a 10-month fellowship aimed at professional development.

Mansell says she joined CET because of her interest in waste reduction and energy efficiency. During her fellowship, Mansell conducted a marketplace assessment for Connecticut focused on food waste. Since then, she has continued to work with food waste, primarily acting as an agent to help connect food waste generators with composters, kitchens and anaerobic digestion facilities. Her skills as a communicator also have come in handy as a leader in the US Composting Council’s Young Professionals group, where she serves as chair of the steering committee.

While Mansell says she has cherished working at CET, her time there is ending, which she says is “bittersweet.” She is joining Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Resource Recycling Systems, also known as RRS, and moving to Boulder, Colorado, this month to help oversee the firm’s initiatives in that state.

"Generally speaking, universities can be a great starting point because they may have a designated sustainability coordinator to drive these initiatives forward."

Waste Today (WT): Of the various food-related industries, which has been the smoothest to work with?

Coryanne Mansell (CM): Generally speaking, universities can be a great starting point because they may have a designated sustainability coordinator to drive these initiatives forward. And students who are part of the environmental committee or environmental working group can be advocates for greater change on campus. So, I would say working with universities [allows us to] think outside the box maybe a little bit easier. … Those initial conversations maybe don’t focus on cardboard recycling but are [focused on] how we can create energy on campus, and then we work backward. And so that’s kind of nice. There’s a lot of brainstorming that can happen [within] university spaces.

WT: What are some future challenges you foresee with food waste diversion in the commercial arena?

CM: I would say, for one, contamination. We really need to make sure that we learn from our prior challenges. So, for example, the one-bin systems where [material] will be separated later. I’m very wary of those because it’s not the behavior change that we really need to ensure that when we’re going home, we’re also being more mindful about the food that we can be preventing from being surplus or wasted. … When we have those one-bin systems, it takes away from that impact of “Oh, now that I see it in all in one container, I see that we overbought apples.” And it’s the same with the home consumer, as well. If we’re just throwing our cardboard in one bin, our trash, as well as the leftover berries, we might not pick up on [realizations of], “Oh wow, I’m generating a lot of single-use plastic” or “Well, I’m generating a lot of surplus berries that I don’t eat.”

That’s something I don’t want to get lost, … because sometimes we can forego the importance of behavior change and awareness that can happen first.

… Also, supporting [composting] infrastructure is needed. I think sometimes we implement organics recycling [and] organic waste bans without doing the homework … of seeing what our composters need to grow to scale so that they can meet the demand of our business community once they’re regulated and mandated to separate their food scraps.