At Huntington Bank Stadium, the trash can’t hide anymore.
Minnesota Gopher Athletics said its game-day waste diversion rate reached 88.6% during the 2025 football season, the latest sign that a program that started from scratch in 2012 has turned into one of the cleaner operations in college sports. The goal has long been 90%, and the progress has been dramatic: the program opened at just 40% diversion when it launched.
Brady Buresh, the Senior Director of Facilities and Event Operations at the University of Minnesota Athletics, said the rise didn’t happen by accident.
"We worked heavily with our campus partners back in 2012 to bring this zero waste effort to fruition," Buresh told FOX 9.
The numbers backed that up all season. Minnesota’s best single-game mark came against Michigan State, when the stadium hit 91%. The Farm Aid concert at the stadium also reached 90%.
"So, it's really shown that we can do it and our efforts actually have some juice behind it," Buresh said.
The system fans see on game day is simple on the surface: three bins, one each for recycling, compost and trash. But behind the scenes, the operation gets messy fast. Crews begin sorting during the game itself, then keep going overnight and into the next day.
"And this process really starts during the game. Once kickoff goes, we start sorting the waste that we currently have in the stadium," Buresh said. "We will sort throughout the game, overnight, and into the next day."
By Sunday, the work has shifted into the bowl of the stadium. Crews go through the stands, drain liquid from beer cans and other beverage cans, and pull apart the organic material from everything else.
"So, we'll have people going through all the stands, and we'll get the liquid out of all the beer cans and all the beverage cans," said Buresh.
That means separating organics first, then recyclables, then the true trash. Peanut shells, popcorn and other organic waste are picked out and sent to the right place.
"Then we'll blow the peanut shells, the popcorn, pick everything out that's not an organic source and put that in," Buresh said. "And then we have our trash dumpsters removed and then we will get a score to see what our diversion rate is for those games."
A lot of the heavy lifting happens before fans even arrive, especially when it comes to what vendors are serving. Buresh said the university has worked closely with Aramark to make sure the products entering the stadium are actually compostable.
He pointed to a change from a drink setup that once included a recyclable cup, a compostable lid and a trash straw. Now, all three pieces are compostable, which makes the sorting job much easier.
He also cited Coca-Cola’s compostable Powerade cups for the sideline as an example of how product availability has improved. That wasn’t an option until about two years ago, he said. More broadly, he said sustainability has changed a lot over the last decade or so, with recycling once the main focus and compostable products becoming much more common over the last five to seven years.
Fans have become part of the process too. Buresh said the new three-bin setup, now common across the Twin Cities, has made it easier for people in the stands to sort correctly. Placards on each bin show exactly where items belong.
"We really love seeing the fans utilize our new bins, and we really hope they have fun with it," Buresh said. "And they can really help us out to our overall goals that we're trying to achieve, not only here at Huntington Bank Stadium, but for Gopher Athletics and the University of Minnesota as a whole."
The results have earned attention beyond campus. Gopher Athletics has been named a waste leader by the Green Sports Alliance for the past two years, based on its diversion rates.
Buresh said the stadium’s sustainability work goes beyond zero waste, too. The platform also includes water consumption, energy management, building automation and storm water management, all tied to the University of Minnesota’s larger campus sustainability efforts.
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