How Spelman College Turned Food Waste into a Campus-Wide Climate Solution

Chapters

00:00 Meet Iesha Baldwin and Sustainable Spelman 

02:30 How the Sustainable Spelman Initiative Began 

05:57 Spelman’s Current Climate and Sustainability Initiatives 

15:12 What Is Spelman’s Climate Action Plan? 

18:38 Energy Efficiency and Building Retrofits at Spelman 

28:55 Reducing Food Waste in Campus Dining 

32:00 Operational Changes That Cut Food and Kitchen Waste 

36:46 How Spelman Keeps Compost Contamination Low 

41:53 Advice for Building a Sustainability Program at Smaller Institutions 

49:54 What’s Giving Iesha Hope

Food waste is one of the most visible, and most solvable, sustainability challenges on a college campus. At Spelman College, building a successful composting program has taken thoughtful operational design, strong vendor partnerships, and close coordination between dining services and facilities.

In this edition of the Georgia Climate Digest interview series, host and Spelman alumna Eriqah Vincent sits down with Iesha Baldwin, Spelman College’s first Sustainability Coordinator, to talk about how the Sustainable Spelman initiative began, what the college’s Climate Action Plan covers, and how Spelman’s food waste and composting program has diverted hundreds of thousands of pounds of waste from the landfill.

How Did Sustainable Spelman Get Started?

Iesha traces the initiative back to a speech by former Spelman president Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum around 2010, in which she framed sustainability as something every student, faculty, and staff member has a role in. From that seed, the Sustainable Spelman initiative grew into a campus-wide effort, with Facilities Director Art Frazier championing the work from the beginning. Iesha and Eriqah talk through some of the early challenges, including helping people across different departments, from the arts to computer science, see themselves as part of the sustainability effort.

What Does Spelman’s Climate Action Plan Cover?

Spelman was among the first HBCUs to adopt a Climate Action Plan, first developed around 2011–2012 and now being updated with support from Southface and Sustain Our Future. Iesha explains what a Climate Action Plan is: a document that lays out how an institution will reduce its carbon emissions and achieve climate neutrality. She credits Spelman’s facilities leadership for treating sustainability as foundational rather than an afterthought, including a Board of Trustees resolution requiring all new and retrofitted buildings to meet LEED Gold standards.

How Does Spelman Decide Which Buildings to Retrofit?

Retrofitting a dorm and retrofitting an academic building are two very different conversations, and Iesha walks through how Spelman prioritizes projects, works with partners like Southface, Siemens, and Walker-Miller on energy assessments, and integrates efficiency upgrades into larger capital projects to ensure the investment has a long lifecycle.

How Does Spelman’s Composting Program Actually Work?

Rather than placing compost bins across campus, Spelman uses a back-of-house model: bins live behind the scenes in dining service areas, managed by trained staff working with food service provider Bon Appétit. That design keeps contamination rates extremely low, meaning nearly everything collected can actually be turned into compost by partner CompostNow. Since 2021, the program has produced more than 30,000 pounds of finished compost for local growers and gardeners.

Whether you’re building a sustainability program from scratch or trying to scale one at a larger institution, this conversation offers a grounded look at how one Georgia HBCU turned an invisible operational challenge into a visible campus win.

What You’ll Learn

• How a speech by former president Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum helped launch Sustainable Spelman.
• What a Climate Action Plan is, and what Spelman’s covers.
• Why Spelman requires new and retrofitted buildings to meet LEED Gold standards.
• How Spelman decides which buildings to prioritize for energy-efficiency retrofits.
• Why a back-of-house composting model keeps contamination rates low.
• How Spelman’s partnerships with Bon Appétit and CompostNow have diverted food waste from landfills.
• Iesha’s advice for sustainability staff at smaller, less-resourced institutions.
• What’s giving Iesha Baldwin hope about climate progress in Georgia.

Continue reading in our companion blog for additional examples, best practices, and key takeaways from Iesha’s conversation about building a campus-wide sustainability program.

Download the Interview Transcript

Prefer to read the conversation instead? Download the complete PDF transcript of this interview with Iesha Baldwin to explore her insights on Sustainable Spelman, the college’s Climate Action Plan, energy-efficiency retrofits, and food waste and composting.