Rethinking the Way We Recycle

Environmentally conscious liberal arts students aren't the only ones concerned about waste from plastic bottles-the Coca-Cola Company, out of Londonderry, NH, one of Sodexo's main beverage providers, has taken significant steps to make its production process more environmentally friendly.

It seems like anything and everything humans do pollutes or taxes the Earth in some way. It's a sad and inescapable fact. But there are things we can do as a community, as individuals and as businesses to lighten our impact on the environment--by simply buying and throwing away less, reusing products as much as possible, and recycling items properly.

While PSU departments collectively discard tons of material each year, the campus is committed to handling the material in a responsible way by reducing and recycling waste whenever possible. 

Recycling materials, such as coke bottles, paper, and cardboard boxes, helps keep these items out of landfills. This conserves energy and natural resources, reduces pollution, and supports the market for secondary materials. Ultimately, this also helps reduce the waste disposal costs for PSU. 

According to Ray Dube, Coca-Cola's Sustainability Manager of Northern New England, "Recycled materials are in high demand because of their value to clothing companies and the makers of board games, composite decking material, and plastic food containers."

There are clothing companies that actually use recycled material to make some of their clothes, such as The North Face, and Patagonia. According to Patagonia they use environmentally friendlier fibers in a number of their products including recycled polyester, organic cotton, hemp, chlorine-free wool, and recycled nylon.

Patagonia clothing, with prodcuts like their recycled polyester fleece jackets, is a positive step towards clothing companies having the ability to have a more sustainable system. "Over the course of 13 years, we saved some 86 million soda bottles from the trash heap," says a representative of Patagonia.

"Chopped, cleaned bottle pieces are what makes your polyester thread," Dube mentioned, "From your polyester thread, you get your North Face Jacket...You get Earth Tec...You get your Patagonia. Polar Tec-huge, huge manufacturer in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. All their material is made from polyester, which comes from these pieces. And their biggest problem: they can't get enough of it."

According to Coca-Cola, bottled water bans, which took place at PSU last year, are not the solution to concerns about waste. Rather, representatives of the company acknowledge the high demand for recycled bottles and cans, and they urge everyone to recycle-caps and all.

Coca-Cola has done its part by altering how they transfer materials to their recycling plants, "We do this by using plastic trays, and plastic pallets. You can use them over and over instead of cardboard boxes. Roughly 17 years of using trays and pallets you can save 154 million lbs. of cardboard, 270 oak trees," said Dube. 

Recycling cannot only help save the environment, but it can be used to create so many more resources and things such as new recyclable material, architectural structures, and clothing. "The ingredient these companies are looking for is PET, it is inside your water bottles, coke bottles, anything that has a number 1 on the bottom of your bottles," added Dube.

The Coca-Cola Company built the biggest PET Recycling Plant in North America, which takes all of this material, processes it, and turns it back into new bottles. 

Many more companies could be taking advantage of recycling their products, and many have reached out to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company to take steps towards sustainability, "We just don't recycle enough material at this point," said Dube.

Dube mentioned some things are best left out of the recycling bin, and brought elsewhere, "Glass is the toughest thing recycle, it is heavy, and if it breaks it contaminates everything,"  

He added, "If you have single stream recycling, put it in your recycling bin, the technology for recycling has been advancing so much over the past five years, eventually we will find a new way to recycle the glass to make it more efficient and valuable"

Some college campuses have taken on the challenge to find a new way to recycle glass. Michigan State University built a retaining wall out of glass and concrete. Half of the wall was built with cement, and the other with glass, "they found that the glass side of the wall actually held up better," said Dube.

The weight of glass is one of its hindering components, "I can put 2200 cases of sixteen ounces of plastic water bottles on my truck, versus 1200 glass bottles on the road, it would make my truck overweight. It would take twice as many trucks to ship glass in comparison to plastic. Plastic saves twice as much diesel fuel, twice as much traffic, twice as much pollution," stated Dube.

The most interesting thing going on in your recycling bin right now is your laundry soap jugs, and shampoo bottles, years back they used to be what Dube described as junk material,  "It had to do with the color of the bottles like Tide, it was difficult to predict what color it would make when it was processed, but now they are used to build some pretty amazing things," added Dube.

Laundry jugs, and shampoo bottles are now considered to be very valuable. "A company in New Jersey made them into a construction material, and took it up to York, Maine, and built an entire bridge out of laundry soap jugs and shampoo bottles. You will never need to paint it, no chemicals, and it won't ever wear down over time," commented Dube.

"Your campus should be single stream, everything goes into one recycling bin, that is the most efficient system we have in this country. They say it's the least amount of diesel fuel to transport, and you collect the most amount of material"

"We [Londonderry Coca-Cola Production Plant] produced over 20 million cases in our plant last year, that plant operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Last year they got over 6000 truck loads of material to produce those cases. That building operates on one 8 yard dumpster that got emptied nine times...You guys produce more trash in one day on this campus than we produced in a year," said Dube.

"At the end of the day somebody in this country wants our material to produce it into something new, " said Dube. "We work very hard as a company to keep all this material in our local economy."