Recycling Services

The Homewood Recycling Office is committed to responsible waste reduction and disposal in order to protect the health of our community and our environment. We strive to increase the reuse, recycling and composting of waste generated on the Homewood campus and reduce the amount of waste incinerated. We do this by educating faculty, staff and students about how and why waste should be sorted, making waste segregation easy and convenient; and encouraging the reduction of waste generation by promoting reuse.

Services

Homewood Recycling transports building waste including paper; cardboard; metal, plastic and glass recyclables; compostable material and trash for all academic buildings on the Homewood campus. In addition to the daily waste collected from offices and common spaces, Homewood Recycling provides large volume recycling and trash collection, electronics recycling, furniture reuse and recycling, and event support services by request. All recycling requests except for event support and bulk waste/furniture removal are free. Event support pricing is based on the size of the event and bulk waste/furniture removal is billed at the hourly labor rate.

Please review the FAQs or email us with your questions.

• General
• Staff 
• Student

Request Recycling Services 

Hop Reuse Hub 

The Hop Reuse Hub was established to reduce waste by encouraging the use of quality, secondhand furniture previously owned by Johns Hopkins University departments while saving the University money by avoiding the purchase of new furniture. In addition to furniture, we offer office supplies and reupholstery services to the JHU community. We also host Fix-it Fairs for faculty, staff and student and provide donations to local Baltimore nonprofits. Please visit the Hop Reuse Hub page for more information.

Event Support

All catered events will incur a standard hourly labor charge for the delivery and collection of waste bins and the disposal of waste as follows:

• 1-100 people = 1 hour
• 101-200 people = 2 hours
• 201-300 people = 3 hours
• 301+ people = 4 hours

To promote JHU's carbon footprint reduction and recycling rate goals, events that meet criteria for being a Zero Waste Event will not be charged! A Zero Waste Event is one that produces no trash for the incinerator and all waste from the event is recyclable or compostable. Please note that requests are only considered Zero Waste if the group or caterer is using all compostable service ware. View the JHU Preferred Green Catering List, to locate vetted caterers that provide compostable service ware at no additional charge for JHU events.

In order to effectively schedule and support these events, please submit your event support request at least 2 business days prior to your event. Groups that fail to do so will be charged double.

Request Event Support

Food Waste Reduction and Diversion

About 1/3 of all the food produced globally is wasted, consequently contributing about 8% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions behind China and the United States. Yet, one of the most striking and empowering things about this global challenge, is there are a multitude of opportunities for us to reduce food waste, recover it to feed people and divert it from the incinerator. At the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus, Homewood Recycling has established various programs and partnerships to combat food waste while providing resources for our campus community who are experiencing food insecurity. These include The Free Food Alert Program, Baltimore Community Food Resources, and the Baltimore Food Waste Reduction Working Group.