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Environmental Services increases Elon's recycling efforts for 2002 |
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It's easy being green!
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By Jennifer
Guarino '03 In January, Environmental Services made a New Year's resolution -- to step up Elon's recycling program. Unlike many resolutions that never make it past the first month, Physical Plant Director Ed Eng and Manager of Environmental Services Hardy White say they are committed to keeping this one. Currently, recycling takes place in all residence halls. This new program brings recycling to several academic and administrative buildings. The main aspect of this plan is the collection of white paper that began in mid-January. Each year, the university purchases roughly 900,000 sheets of white 8.5" x 11" paper, much of which will now be recycled. Director of Purchasing Rob Brown says paper brought to campus by students probably brings the total up to one million sheets.The first phase of the new recycling program calls for white paper to be collected at least weekly in designated recycling buildings -- Long, Alamance, Duke, Powell, Whitley, Mooney and McEwen as well as Belk Library, where students use about 15 cases of paper a week. Says Library Director Kate Hickey, "Most of us have assumed paper in the blue bins already was being recycled. We have discussed the advantages of recycling with Physical Plant staff in the past and are delighted they are able to implement this program."  White
says the blue recycling bins that have been in many offices on campus for
years are remnants of a previous system, and in recent years items placed
in these bins were sent to the landfill along with trash. Although that
is still the case in some buildings, under the new program, white paper
in the designated recycling buildings will be collected separately and staged
in a central location for recycling. (There will also be a central repository
for soda cans in each of the designated buildings, typically beside vending
machines.) Eng says future phases of the program will expand the white paper
and aluminum recycling into other buildings and include the recycling of
other materials, such as plastic and glass.Environmental Services currently supports five recycling stations at Danieley Center, two at Jordan Center and one at Elon West, which collect plastic, aluminum cans, glass and mixed papers. Containers in the residence halls collect newspapers, plastic and aluminum cans. Each month, an average of 37 tons of trash is collected from 20 dumpsters on campus. Over the course of a year, about 450 tons of waste is taken to the landfill in Saxapahaw. At $33 a ton, the university spends close to $15,000 a year in landfill costs. However, about 18 tons of recyclable materials are diverted from the landfill each year through the collection inside residence halls and at outdoor collection points at Danieley Center, Jordan Center and Elon West. Waste Industries picks up this mixed product and takes it to a company named FCR in Greensboro, where the recyclables are then sorted. Another goal for Environmental Services is to eliminate the middleman in cardboard collection. Currently, Elon pays a contractor to remove cardboard from campus. Environmental Services is looking into alternatives to avoid the contractor cost and deal directly with the recycler. Eng and White say the new recycling program is starting off small and will grow over the next few years to include other collection locations. "We're going to bite off a little piece," White says. "Sometimes when you bite off too much, it gets hard to chew." White says Environmental Services is going to do all it can to recycle Elon's waste, but everyone's help is needed. "It's a shared responsibility," White says. "It's not just one group or one person. It will not get done unless we all work together." |
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