It's Earth Day. Here's How to Make Less Trash.

Danner Doud-Martin is not a climate change expert or a scientist. But she’s the person I wanted to talk to for Earth Day.

Doud-Martin works for University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where she recently led a successful effort to make the school’s Chou Hall the “greenest academic building in the country.”

This year it was certified as TRUE Platinum Zero Waste, meaning the building sends almost nothing to the landfill. Like, ever.

“We encourage a ‘pack in, pack out’ mentality, like going into a forest,” Doud-Martin told me.

The building, which opened in 2017, has places to dispose of compostable material and to recycle, but as the economy behind recycling starts to collapse, environmental advocates are trying to encourage people to produce less waste to begin with. (See: efforts to ban plastic straws.)

Doud-Martin said that initially, it was tough to persuade harried students and overworked educators to get onboard.

“There were a lot of questions of: Does it matter if I put my trash in the solar bellies right outside?” she said. “What I’ve been telling people is, ‘It’s so you have to think about it.’ ”

For the most part, she said, they’ve come around.

Still, getting a whole building down to “zero waste” isn’t so simple.

There’s a cafe where students, teachers and staff pick up lunch, often to eat at their desks. That’s been tricky, too, she said.

Right now, customers are encouraged to bring their own containers. Snacks are sold in bulk rather than plastic-intensive packaging, and there are no beverages in single-use bottles.

The final piece? Everyone has been asked to print a lot less — a tough task for a school that has previously run on hard copies of case studies.

Ultimately, it’s been satisfying, Doud-Martin said. She said she’s been fielding inquiries from others on the UC Berkeley campus, as well as representatives from schools around the state about the zero waste effort.

“People are definitely starting to focus their careers on sustainability and so forth,” she said. “People are looking at Haas and what we’re doing and maybe it means they come here versus Harvard, or versus Stanford.”

So what if you want to create less waste? Here are some tips from Doud-Martin:

1. Bring your own reusable cutlery, cups, napkins and grocery bags wherever you can. “I use linens; I always have a fork on me — I can always bust out that fork for you,” she said. While she used to return plastic grocery bags to the store, now that’s not an option, because, “there’s nothing to do with them.” So she tries to carry reusable bags for produce.

2. Learn what grade of plastic your city or county recycles.

3. Biodegradable does not mean compostable.

4. You might be able to recycle or compost unexpected things. You can compost a pizza box, and you can recycle foil, if you scrape the goop off.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.