Is There an Elephant in Your Dumpster?

In a ten-month period last year, PSU sent 417.25 tons of trash to landfills-and about 30 percent of that waste could have been recycled instead. To visualize 417 tons of trash, imagine a male elephant. Now imagine a pile of old term papers, empty glass and plastic bottles, retired furniture, and everything else that gets thrown away is roughly the weight of 56 male elephants. That’s a lot of trash. Chris Johnson, Manager of Building Services at Physical Plant was hired this year. One of Johnson’s first tasks was to analyze and overhaul PSU’s then-leaderless recycling program. Since then, there have been a number of improvements in the visibility and accessibility of the program. For instance, recycling bins and associated signs throughout campus buildings were standardized, and larger barrels are on the way. Residents of the student apartments now have easier access to three large dumpsters reserved exclusively for the disposal of cans and bottles. Students and faculty received brochures clarifying what should-and should not-be recycled (see sidebar). A large portion of recyclable waste is often office paper. To help ease the amount of waste, faculty and staff who did not have a personal recycling bin were given one. The result of this overhaul was a decrease in solid waste by three tons, accompanied by a 1.8-ton increase in recycled materials just in September. Each ton of recycled plastic saves 16.3 barrels of oil, 5,774 KWH of energy, and 30 cubic yards of landfill space. As significant as these efforts are, however, Johnson stresses that they need to be accompanied by an educational component aimed at “integrating [recycling] into people’s way of thinking.” This goes beyond merely knowing where bins are located and what should go in them; any successful program seeks to become an automatic part of its participants’ daily lives. In keeping with this philosophy, Johnson hopes that the program will ultimately run itself. One way this might be achieved is by tapping motivated students to become leaders in conservation, an approach modeled by the University of Vermont’s recycling program. That program assigns residents in each dorm to educate other students about the program and to encourage participation-a real student-led endeavor. Johnson agrees. “We can . . . throw money at [the program],” he comments, “but the real participation will come from that grassroots effort.”This effort is still far from being realized; right now, the focus is on raising awareness of the program itself. One ongoing issue is the need for students to keep food waste and other trash separate from recyclable material; according to regulations, one piece of trash thrown into a bin full of legitimate recyclables renders the whole bin “contaminated,” and all of the contents must be treated as trash. There have also been accounts of individuals openly resisting the program and refusing to participate, although Johnson notes that the overall response to the program has been positive.