Making the Case for “All in the Hall” Centralized Collections
The traditional arrangement for collecting indoor waste is grounded in several long-standing, blanket assumptions about how people behave: People are lazy and will not go out of their way to discard waste responsibly. In an office or other away-from-home settings, this means waste receptacles must be placed in the immediate proximity to where waste is generated or some percentage of people will leave items behind as litter. Remove receptacles and housekeeping staff will spend more time tidying up a location than they would have spent servicing the bin in place.
But human behavior is tricky. While these assumptions about litter and recycling apply in some situations, there’s clear evidence showing they don’t in others. Hidden in this nuance is a key to greater waste diversion and operational efficiency.
Enter Centralized Collections, a housekeeping model that shifts greater responsibility from custodians to individuals to handle their own personal waste. The two most common examples apply to office desks and classrooms and meeting rooms. The exact arrangement varies from one example to the next, but they typically involve removing smaller trash and recycling baskets from these locations while directing office workers, students and others to carry waste items out to larger centrally placed bin stations in hallways and other common areas. Under this system, sometimes referred to as “all-in-the-hall”, custodians may continue cleaning office workstations and classrooms but their role servicing waste is limited to the centralized bin stations.
The recently published report, Indoor Waste & Diversion Practices at Colleges and Universities reveals both a clear trend toward this model and evidence of the benefits to adopting it. Published by Busch Systems and partner organizations including AASHE, National Wildlife Federation, College & University Recycling Coalition (CURC) and Zero Waste Campus Council, the report summarizes the results of a spring 2024 survey of campus sustainability managers. Among other things, the survey showed that nearly all schools that had implemented centralized collections in offices and classrooms saved custodial labor as a result. Strong majorities also said the arrangements resulted in direct cost savings, higher waste diversion and lower contamination. Importantly, removing bins from classrooms and meeting rooms had either no impact or led to a reduction in litter in almost all cases. And while a minority of colleges and universities have implemented either arrangement, the numbers point to a clear trend of more adopting them.
You can read a general overview of the project with this earlier blog. You can also read a three-blog series about centralized collections from office workstations that I wrote several years ago. With this two-blog series I’m focusing specifically on how the centralized model applies to classroom and meeting room situations. Keep reading for a deeper dive into the potential benefits and research showing how it can deliver them. In a second blog I’ll review the best practices and lessons learned about how to implement it.
Removing Waste Bins Causes… Less Litter??
The main pushback to an all-in-the-hall system usually comes from custodians, who’s intuition suggests, not without reason, that removing waste receptacles from classrooms and meeting rooms will cause more people to leave trash behind on the tables and floor. While this can happen, there is strong evidence to show that with careful planning it’s more likely to have the opposite if any effect. Litter behavior is not simply about laziness or lack of convenient opportunities. It’s also heavily influenced by expectations and social norms.
Many feel comfortable leaving waste on the ground in a movie theater because they perceive it as normal, and they’re conditioned to seeing an attendant sweeping up as people exit the theater. Even if it were a faux pas to leave candy wrappers under their seat, you’re surrounded by strangers you’ll never see again. Who cares what they think?
A classroom or meeting room setting is different. More than likely, you know or at least interact on a regular basis with the people around you, so there’s greater social pressure not to be a slob. As long as there’s a clear expectation to carry waste out of the room and a confidence they’ll find bins in the hallway, people generally follow along. The report findings back this up. Of the colleges and universities that have gone to this system, 92% said litter was not an issue. In fact, for every one school that said litter increased, three pointed to less litter after removing bins. UC Berkeley, the University of Florida and Penn State are just a few in this latter group. Some of the reductions may be attributed to people simply not having a target for the careless toss that misses a waste basket. The bigger factor, though, is that removing bins simplifies and reinforces a fundamental understanding that people are responsible to handle their own waste. No one else is coming into that room to clean up after them.
The point about clear expectations is important, though. As I’ll come back to in the part 2 of this blog, a communication strategy is critical to establishing this new understanding.
Removing Bins Improves Recycling & Waste Diversion
The point of having a recycling program is to keep waste out of the landfill. And here again, removing bins leads to better outcomes. Seventy-four percent of schools said removing bins led to higher waste diversion, with 11% calling the improvement “significant”. Sixty-four percent said contamination (trash ending up in recycling bins and/or recyclables in the trash) went down, with 17% of these schools rating it “significant”. In one case, a 2009 UNC Charlotte pilot project resulted in a 25% increase in recycling. Oregon State University did a 2014 pilot across four buildings that caused the rate of recyclables tossed in the trash to drop from 32% or higher down to an average of 1.5%.
There are a couple caveats to mention. Schools tend to implement multiple changes at once, so bins might be removed from classrooms at the same time hallways are being updated with new centralized bins or the addition of a new compost collection stream. The University of Nebraska- Lincoln’s All in the Hall pilot, for example, saw contamination cut in half and the amount of recyclables found in the trash drop by 10%, but they had no way to separate the effect of removing classroom bins from that of the new bin signage and other changes. The other asterisk to note is that most schools implement these types of changes without a budget or process to objectively measure the outcomes. So many of the survey responses reflect the informal observations of sustainability staff in place of hard data. But while the survey stats lack scientific rigor, one can argue the similar observations of so many sustainability professionals offers a collective, if informal, endorsement of the arrangement’s potential.
For the hard science we turn to several academic studies that have investigated waste and diversion from classrooms. Binder, Glasser & Fuqua (2017) and Fritz, et al. (2017) both tested the same basic premise, measuring the before and after effects of removing classroom bins and directing people to the centralized stations in the hallways. On separate occasions Fritz, et al. saw the number of cans and bottles in recycling bins increase three-fold (and no change in litter rates). Binder, Glasser & Fuqua experienced a 20% increase in recycling (by weight) and, again, no change in litter. 
So what explains the improvement in diversion? We can assume the strongest results came from schools that previously had only trash bins in classrooms. By removing those bins they also removed the convenience advantage trash had over recycling bins restricted to hallway locations. The schools likely could have gotten a similar diversion bump by instead adding new recycling bins next to the trash inside classrooms. Previous studies including Ludwig, Gray & Rowell (1998), O’Connor et al. (2010) and Miller, Meindl & Caradine (2016) have shown bringing recycling into the classroom also works, albeit with higher costs that we’ll discuss in a moment.
But some of the improvement also came from schools that previously had and removed both classroom recycling and trash bins. There are a couple possible explanations. A campus may already be collecting food waste for compost in hallways, but virtually none do so with bins in individual rooms. Removing trash from classrooms overrides the same convenience advantage as with recycling. This is more a theory, but I suspect another issue is attention. We think of things like convenience, motivation and knowledge of what is recyclable as the factors that cause someone to sort their waste correctly. None of these matter though if a student is distracted by mid-terms or grabbing lunch before their next class. In the moment it’s easy for someone who’s spaced out to toss an empty bottle into the nearest bin. But carrying that bottle for the 90 seconds it takes to exit the room and pass by a centralized bin station increases the likelihood of them giving focus to the question of how to appropriately sort the item. As I said, it’s just a theory. 
Show Me the Money: What Sells The All-in-the-Hall System
Better waste diversion may warm the heart of sustainability managers, but it’s labor and other cost reductions that put a smile on a decision maker’s face.
Removing bins eliminates both capital and operational costs; without bins in rooms there is no need to maintain or replace them over time. It also neutralizes the cost barrier to putting recycling and trash on an even playing field since it doesn’t require purchasing a second set of bins for each room. Additional centralized bin stations may or may not be necessary in common areas to ensure convenient access for people exiting individual rooms. Even so, this capital cost will be offset by the savings from individual rooms. Removing classroom and meeting room bins also eliminates the ongoing cost to line them with plastic bags. In a 2018 pilot, Miami University of Ohio removed 34 classroom and lab bins from just two buildings, eliminating the need for 4,250 bags and their associated $2,167 annual cost. The bins were reallocated to another building, saving a further $770 otherwise necessary to purchase new bins. A similar pilot across ten buildings at the University of California, Santa Barbara removed 352 bins and reduced annual bag purchases by 47,000.
Emptying a waste basket may seem like a negligible time commitment, but the numbers suggest otherwise. APPA, the association for higher ed facilities professionals publishes FTE estimating protocols as part of the key performance indicators in their Custodial Operational Guidelines for Educational Facilities. They calculate it takes an average 46 seconds to empty and re-bag trash receptacles in a traditional 1,200 square foot room. Extrapolated for 100 classrooms, that’s about 70 minutes a day. The guidelines also calculate that wiping off grime and spillage uses up another 61 seconds of labor per bin, per week. Toss these numbers into a calculator and those 100 bins eat up close to 7 1/2 hours of labor each week just to manage trash. To bring recycling into rooms roughly doubles this number. Custodians, of course, still handle the same volume of waste with all-in-the-hall. But having individuals carry their waste out to a relative handful of centralized hallway bins allows them to manage the collection process with much greater efficiency.
This point was validated by the survey. Over 90% of the schools that had converted to all-in-the-hall said the move resulted in labor savings. Penn State, UMass Dartmouth and Winthrop University were among the 39% that considered this impact “significant”. Miami University calculated their pilot saved 340 hours annually for just two buildings.
An Elegant Solution
Managing waste and recycling for a large institution is deceptively complex. Most of the practices and initiatives it takes to build a successful waste diversion program involves costs and logistical trade-offs, and often delivers only incremental improvements. Whether it’s in a classroom or office deskside context, a centralized collection/all-in-the-hall system has an elegance rare to facilities management; it leads to better performance outcomes. It lowers your institution’s impact on the environment. It requires minimal investment while reducing costs and freeing custodial labor to focus on more important cleaning tasks.
With part two of this blog, I’ll talk about how to implement this system in classrooms and share lessons learned by some of the schools we surveyed.
