Environmental Stewardship

A day in the life photo essay with Vonlee “Duke” Wells

Meet Vonlee "Duke" Wells -- a waste handler II with the Waste Management Team. Each day during his 4:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. shift, Duke and two others handle about 6-8 tons of trash.

All the red carts come to Duke from Taubman, UH and Mott. He uses this device to pull many carts at a time from access elevators to dock 5.

On a normal day, by 10 a.m. Duke will have emptied 75 of these carts.

Duke sorts through the carts for cardboard, plastics, red bags and chemotherapy waste buckets to ensure everything goes to the correct place.

Duke is just one person, but he's also one big reason why we have such a successful recycling program. Because people like Duke help sort through the daily trash output for the proper recyclable materials: cardboard and plastics.

All the cardboard is thrown into a giant compactor.

Here's Duke with all the plastics that are recycled from the UH.

This sign hangs above the regular waste compactor to remind everyone that all biohazard waste or red bag materials should be sent to the autoclave for proper handling and disposal.

The other half of Duke's job is to get all red bag waste into these biohazard bins and up to the autoclave. We can help Duke and his team by disposing only red bag waste into the red bags.

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