Sustainability Coordinator Featured By GreeNYC

For Government and Politics major Eleni Moukas, sustainability isn’t just “pulp” fiction. A Sustainability Coordinator on the St. John’s Queens campus since April 2017, Eleni is involved with the process of pulping campus food waste for compost to use in the University’s organic garden. She was recently featured in a GreeNYC video about her sustainability efforts on campus.

As part of her job as Sustainability Coordinator, Eleni collects food waste from the dining halls on campus and uses St. John’s own food pulper—built right here on campus—to chop up the food waste and then turn it into composted organic soil.

“We built our own pulper from scratch,” she said. “Only a few places in the city have a pulper, which is on the cutting edge of sustainability technology.”

Food waste goes into the pulper’s chute and is then mixed with water. The pulper chops the food and removes the water. The pulp is then mixed with woodchips and coffee grinds to form compost. With the organic soil produced through this process, students plant vegetables in the University’s organic garden. The summer harvest goes to the Food Recovery Network and to St. John’s Bread & Life.

“Instead of throwing out all of this food waste from the dining halls, it’s going to a better cause and feeding hungry New Yorkers,” said Eleni.

Eleni, whose hometown is Dix Hills, NY, came to St. John’s to study Criminal Justice, but found the major did not fit her interests. She instead chose to major in Government and Politics so she could study international government and politics. Eleni hopes to attend law school and, now that she has developed an interest in sustainability through her work on the St. John’s campus, aims to pursue a career in environmental law.