Between the weeks of February 3rd and March 30th PSU competed in Recyclemania. This is an 8 week competition in which schools, from the US and Canada, are ranked according to how much recycling and trash is collected.
Paula Davis from the Alcoa Foundation, a sponsor of Recyclemania, described the importance of this competition in saying “By motivating and educating students, we’re encouraging lifelong positive recycling behaviors that will reduce the need for landfills and save substantial amounts of energy and money.”
Through the efforts of Physical Plant and the Office of Environmental Sustainability, PSU was able to track and record the weights of trash and recyclables thrown out each week on campus. This year PSU competed in 4 categories of Recyclemania: Grand Champion, Per Capita Classic, Gorilla, and Waste Minimization. Here are the final results for the entirety of the competition.
How do these results compare to previous years? In 2012 PSU competed in the Waste Minimization and Gorilla categories. During that year 28.24 lbs. of waste per person was generated and 63,368 lbs. of recyclables were collected. When comparing the 2012 results to those of 2013, we find that as a campus we generated 7.12 more pounds of waste (recyclables + trash) in 2013.
Additionally, we see that we had 14,888 fewer pounds of recyclables collected in the 2013 competition. Thus, there was greater waste and fewer recyclables throughout Recyclemania 2013. This increase in waste may be due to the greater efficiency in collecting waste.
In 2010 PSU competed in the Grand Champion and Per Capita Classic categories. The recycling rate for Grand Champion was 25.51% throughout the 8-week competition. For the Per Capita Classic category the campus community recycled 8.51 lbs. of recyclables per person. Therefore students/staff recycled 0.355 fewer pounds of recyclables in the 2013 competition.
Recyclemania is a priority here at Plymouth State. In 2008 President Steen signed the President’s Climate Commitment, where she vowed that PSU would be carbon neutral by 2050. As part of this commitment, we are required to participate in Recyclemania each year, specifically in the waste minimization category.
The impact of this requirement is evident in our campus today. When discussing the results of Recyclemania on campus Brian Eisenhauer, the Director of the Office of Environmental Sustainability said, “The best results of Recyclemania on campus are first, simply raising awareness about the importance of recycling, and second, carefully measuring our practices as a University. We can all contribute to living more sustainably, and many of the things we can do are simple changes in our everyday living.”
This year there were 523 schools that participated in Recyclemania. The total number of recyclables collected was 90.3 million pounds, preventing the release of nearly 121,463 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere.
“Continuing to remind people about the importance of recycling is an important part of the effort to integrate it into everyday life as the normal way of doing things. Closely tracking our recycling practices as a University against a national standard of environmentally conscious Universities helps us ensure we are doing all we can as a institution to reduce our environmental impacts, and can help identify areas we need to improve,” said Eisenhauer.
The Office of Environmental Sustainability would like to thank Physical Plant for making Recyclemania at PSU possible, as well as the efforts of the campus community.