The Campus Recycling Program is changing from a four-part to a two-part recycling system for paper in an effort to get more students to recycle.
For years, recycling paper involved sorting paper into four bins: white paper, colored paper, low-grade paper and newspapers. Campus Recycling is now beginning to transition its recycling stations to two bins: white paper and everything else.
“We’re changing because people are confused,” said Karyn Kaplan, Facilities Services environmental resource and recycling manager. “We’ve put signs up in the past, but we’ve found out that they’re hard to read and it was complicated — especially if the bins moved around.
Despite sorting change, Campus Recycling isn’t moving to full co-mingling recyclables, or collecting all materials together in one bin, anytime soon, Kaplan said.
“Co-mingling came around a couple of years ago, but we’re keeping it sorted to maintain integrity in the workplace and integrity of recycling stock and materials,” Kaplan said.
Co-mingling is a popular method of recycling, but Kaplan explained that if someone throws away a cup of coffee half full, or some other food item, into a co-mingling bin, then everything else in the recycling bin is compromised with the spilled coffee. This hurts how much money Campus Recycling can receive for its recyclables.
Campus Recycling gets money for paper and keeps records for everything else recycled. Although final figures have not been totaled yet for the 2009-10 academic year, in 2008-09, Campus Recycling recycled a total of 743.2 tons of paper and collected a total of 1450.98 tons for all recycled material.
University senior and Campus Recycling student worker Emily Moon thinks the change will help diminish work necessary for recycling.
“It makes everything easier ultimately,” Moon said. “We’ll only have to sort through two bins instead of four.”
Recent University graduate and Campus Recycling worker Adam Palodichuk also thinks that the change in paper sorting presents the program with more opportunities for positive growth.
“We had to sort through every kind of material individually, and now we only have to separate glass from everything,” Palodichuk said. “(The change) updates us to a different level of efficiency. We can focus more on compost and recycling education instead of picking up recycling.”
Palodichuk said that the changes in Campus Recycling’s focus will improve the University as well.
“Compost is really important to us,” he said. “We’re a really sustainable campus, but we could be better.”
The switch from a four-part to a two-part paper collecting system took more than a year of brainstorming to conceive and is already being implemented throughout campus.
“We looked at (changing the sorting) to create a broader experience and to encourage more recycling by creating an easier system,” Kaplan said.
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