GO GREEN: Environmentally friendly campus offers students few places to recycle cardboard and plastic

by Amanda Peterka

You wake up one morning and look at the pile of trash collecting in the corner of your dorm room.  About half is recyclable waste:  Easy-Mac boxes, empty water bottles and soda cans.  You finally decide to do something about the trash in your room, so you sort your recyclables and then trek down to the outside of your residence hall to the trash bins. 

A sign greets you:  Trash Only -- No Recyclables!  Hmm, this is strange.  There must be a recyclable container nearby, so you walk around the residence hall, but somehow come back to the same spot still holding all your boxes and bottles. 

“I’ll ask the receptionist. She’ll know where I can put this stuff,” you think. The receptionist directs you to the incinerator room where she insists you will find the proper container.  No luck. 

A bit disgruntled by now, you decide what the hell, chuck your recyclables into the trash bin, rebelliously ignoring the sign and sighing as you kill God-knows-how-many trees.

Sound familiar?

MSU is purportedly an environmentally conscious campus greatly concerned with keeping the place green.  If this is true, then why are there no recycling bins for plastic bottles and cardboard boxes outside residence halls?

Where, oh where, can this kind of stuff be recycled?

There were recycling bins outside the residence halls throughout Welcome Week.  But as soon as the week ended, the bins disappeared.  Student may need more bins during move-in time than any other time throughout the year, but the need doesn’t drop to zero once they settle in.

Without any place to deposit these materials, they can pile up and become a nuisance in dorm rooms.  Some students keep adding to the mound until it is time to go home, lugging their trash home with them. Others end up following the scenario above, throwing their items in the garbage bins.  Still others don’t even try and just give up on the environmental goals of the university.

According to Junior Cammy Otto, a receptionist at Bryan Hall, most students don’t usually ask her about cardboard or plastic bottles, only newspapers.  She suggests the best option is for resident mentors to invest money in a recycling bin for the floors they are responsible for.  When Cammy lived in a dorm, her mentor placed a recycling bin in the community bathroom. 

But many mentors do not see providing recycling bins as their responsibility.  One resident mentor said she heard “there’s a place behind Beaner’s” to recycle cardboard and bottles, but that was all she knew about the issue.

Two years ago, the Residence Halls Association ran a campus-wide residence hall recycling program, but the program was cut and has not been reinstated.   Although every hall has a paper recycling program and all dining halls have a large kitchen program to deal with the recyclable materials they generate every day, at the moment there are no set programs for recycling objects other than paper in residence halls.

Holden Hall is testing out a new recycling program this year, thanks to concerned residents who complained to hall manager Chip Hornburg.  Their combined efforts have led to an experimental recycling program, according to Lynda Bloomer, the university’s Energy & Environmental Engineer. “In Holden Hall on every floor in each wing there’s what used to be called the incinerator room.  And in those rooms, there’s a container for mixed paper, whether it be white paper or student binders, to recycle those.  The housing staff moves it back to the back dock to collect it in a larger container there.”  This program has not expanded to other halls, at least so far.

Apparently the big issue is not in providing containers but in paying for the staff to sort those recyclables and move them to the docking areas of dining halls.  “You have to have someone who is willing to move the product,” explains Bloomer.  Until this issue can be solved, it is unlikely the university will reinitiate any campus-wide residence hall programs.  However, concerned students are encouraged to discuss the problem with their hall managers, since they are the ones who can set up an experimental program such as in Holden.

On the whole, the university is committed to recycling. According to the Winter 2005 issue of REsources, the Office of Recycling and Waste Management’s publication, the university recycled 616,000 pounds of cardboard material and 344,497 pounds of white office paper in 2004.  You can learn more at the Office of Recycling and Waste Management’s website at www.recycle.msu.edu