Menard Correctional Center Sustainability

The Menard Correctional Center is host to a variety of sustainability initiatives—several of which have earned state and national recognition. The goal of Menard's staff has been to grow these efforts beyond the prison's walls by working with fellow stakeholders to help build a sense of sustainability that reaches to the main streets of our local communities.

The Illinois Department of Corrections's (IDOC) Illinois Correctional Industries (ICI) Recycling Program is located at the Menard Correctional Center and has been in operation since 1997. During that period the operation has steadily grown. What began as a cost saving measure to pull used cardboard from the correctional center's waste stream, compacting the cardboard with a used baler, has grown and is now collecting and processing recyclables from a number of state operated facilities as well as most of the municipalities in Randolph County where the facility is located.

The program has had quite a bit of success conducting "special event recycling operations" some of the best examples being the recycling event conducted in partnership with Du Quoin State Fair staff for the many events held at the Fairgrounds including the annual fair itself.

Menard has a robust gardening program that not only provides fresh produce to the facility dietary department, but also also provides gardening and horticulture skills to assigned offenders. Cognizant of the fact that Menard's offender demographic indicates that a vast majority of the population hail from metropolitan areas, and so the "urban gardening" approach has been adopted in an effort to grow more of our own food. The concept teaches offenders how to produce the highest yields in limited available spaces, as would be typical in an urban high population area.

The goal is to have these offenders take these skills with them when they return to their communities where vacant urban areas can be utilized for food production helping reverse the trend of growing food deserts in many inner cities. This is a very effective tool in the fight against hunger and malnutrition since it facilitates the access to food by an impoverished sector of the urban population. Low income urban dwellers spend between 40% and 60% of their income on food each year. Additionally, 250 million hungry people in the world live in cities.

Illinois has been called the "Rain Barrel Capitol of the United States" and Menard ICI has played a large roll in helping the state earn that designation. The respective chemical components for ICI's "green" cleaning products are shipped in 55 gallon plastic drums. Responsibly disposing of the hundreds of empty drums accumulated annually had presented problem for staff. Converting the empty drums into Rain Barrels serves as a great example of a successful "Waste to Profit" project. The manufacture of Rain Barrels also helps to grow our "green collar" vocational training experience and presents another opportunity to instill the concept of sustainability to offenders assigned to our programs. The ICI Rain Barrel Initiative has resulted in over 2000 Rain Barrels being placed throughout the state. Among the more prominent locations where ICI Rain Barrels can now be found are the State Fairgrounds and Executive Mansion.

In an effort to help improve operational sustainability and reduce operating costs, ICI implemented a program to process biodiesel fuel from Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO). The WVO is collected through ICI-Menard's Waste Removal & Recycling Program from IDOC & DHS facilities across the state, as well as from the local community.