FSU Sustainable Green Team wins third consecutive TaxWatch award for recycling programs, free library

Florida State University’s Sustainable Green Team recently won its third award from Florida TaxWatch for establishing two new recycling programs and FSU’s first Little Free Library.

The awards program at TaxWatch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog and taxpayer research institute in Tallahassee, has recognized state employees and teams who increase productivity and promote innovation since 1989. This year, 10 organizations were recognized, including FSU’s Sustainable Green Team.

FSU’s Sustainable Green Team, comprised of six members from four FSU and Florida A&M University departments, is led by Mitch Gans, who manages the Research Computing Center Data Center in FSU’s Information Technology Services. Members are Amy Finley and Kev Sullivan of the Center for Information Management and Educational Services (CIMES), Daynah Blake and Mehmet Öztan of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering’s RIDER Center, and Dina Vyortkina of the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences.

The team came together about four years ago, as people began to return to their offices after the COVID-19 pandemic. Gans, who had remained in his office in the Sliger Building in Innovation Park during the pandemic, had begun working on the building’s green office certification with the CIMES and RIDER centers, but since the team’s expansion they have been able to take on a variety of waste management programs.

“We look for opportunities to solve big sustainability issues,” Gans said. “We’ve built several new recycling programs.”

The team began recycling plastic six-pack can rings from across campus and has continued to expand its efforts. They developed a materials recovery center to support their zero-waste data center, adopted the street outside their offices with the City of Tallahassee to pick up trash, started a recycling program for e-cigarette batteries, repurposed plastic waste from 3-D printers to create artistic structures and developed a Green Guide certificate program to encourage their allies across campus to become more sustainable.

“The FSU Sustainable Green Team does a lot of work with service providers and recyclable materials and will be looking for more ways to personally engage the community it serves in the future,” Gans said.

Recently, the team has connected with the community through events, including hosting tables at FSU-FAMU College of Engineering events and establishing FSU’s first Little Free Library at the Sliger Building.

The Little Free Library, located at 2035 E. Paul Dirac Dr., is always open and functions on an honor system where anyone can take or share a book. The book-sharing box aims to provide book access to all without the restriction of time, space or privilege, and reduces book and paper waste by providing a way to share used books with the community.

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