Water-soluble confetti available for winter graduation photos

Each winter and spring, Miami University graduates throw their caps up in the air – and sometimes handfuls of plastic confetti, too.

Graduation photos often result in campus being littered with broken champagne bottles and pieces of plastic confetti. During graduation week, this creates three to four hours of work daily for physical facilities workers and an array of environmental problems.

Hoping to prevent the campus-wide litter, Associated Student Government’s sustainability council decided to purchase water-soluble confetti last spring. The financial contribution was matched by President Gregory Crawford through the Office of the President.

The confetti never made it into the hands of students.

Delays due to Miami’s vendor verification process caused the boxes of water-soluble confetti to arrive at the end of the semester – too late for spring graduation use. After sitting in the ASG office for months, it is ready to be put into use.

The confetti now sits in small, recyclable envelopes, waiting to be picked up by winter graduates during the Grad Central event at Brick and Ivy this Thursday Nov. 6, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event aims to equip this semester’s graduates with the graduation gear and information they need.

John Day, president of the Student Sustainability Council (SSC) and a senior majoring in psychology and English literature, helped host a packaging event to prepare the confetti for handout. He said the event was successful, and he was glad to see the initiative come together so successfully after months of work.

“I was very happy,” Day said. “We’ll probably do an event similar in the upcoming weeks, maybe to get more hands on deck and try to just knock it out.”

Miami’s director of sustainability Olivia Herron said she is hopeful that the initiative will make a significant difference in the amount of litter produced during the graduation seasons. Herron helped successfully implement a similar program during her previous position at Austin Peay State University.

“We were really pleased,” Herron said. “At least anecdotally, the feedback we got from the grounds crew was that it substantially reduced the amount of plastic confetti they were seeing being used on campus.”

Herron said she hopes Miami’s initiative can allow students to have fun taking graduation photos while cutting back on plastic that ends up in waterways. Physical facilities workers spend hours cleaning up the litter, and Herron hopes this will make their job easier as well. The confetti provided by ASG is made of food starch, and it will dissolve during the first rain.

“We know that students want the fun experience of throwing the confetti and taking the pictures, and we don’t want to take that away from people,” she said. “We just want to provide a more sustainable option.”

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Alex Miller, Miami’s student sustainability coordinator and a graduate student studying biology, said that since the number of winter graduates is smaller, the ASG sustainability council has learned a lot along the way to prepare for next spring’s graduation.

“We have a lot of ideas of ways that we could expand our outreach with it,” Miller said.

These outreach ideas include hosting packaging events with campus organizations looking for service hours and offering students a confetti pack when they pick up their gowns at Brick and Ivy. Any leftover confetti from this graduation’s stock will go towards the spring graduation season.

This November and December, confetti can be picked up by graduating seniors from the Office of Sustainability’s table at Grad Central or at the Armstrong help desk starting next week.

Kennelse@miamioh.edu