Recycling is easily one of the simplest things that anyone can do to help protect the environment and the planet’s natural resources. It requires little to no effort, except to toss soda cans, water bottles, and paper goods into a green bin rather than the trashcan. Universities are taking advantage of the ease of recycling in order to boost their reputation as environmentally-friendly schools. Most colleges now have on-campus recycling programs to help encourage students to begin their new eco-conscious lives by pitching qualifying would-be landfill garbage into campus recycling bins.
The College and University Recycling Council has been working with schools across the country to implement recycling programs on campus since 1992. The organization looks over a school’s recycling needs and develops a recycling plan to help the school successfully push an efficient recycling program that will encourage the maximum amount of waste reduction. Many schools are interested in implementing such recycling programs not only because it would make them look better as an environmentally-conscious institution, but also because it would cut down on waste management costs. It costs money to dispose of garbage, and depending on the frequency with which garbage must be disposed of and how much garbage there is, schools can be spending hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on waste disposal alone. There are fees associated with recycling as well, but the money saved from downsizing the amount of garbage thrown out because of recycling would offset those fees. When it costs the same or even less to implement a recycling program in tandem with a garbage disposal program, many schools opt to introduce recycling to the campus.
To encourage more students to recycle, some schools have developed novel ways of making recycling more fun in addition to simply scattering recycling bins across campus and at residence halls. For example, the University of Michigan has recycling competitions from building to building to see which buildings can produce the least trash and the most recycling. Some schools also have introduced single-stream recycling, which makes recycling even easier by eliminating the need for students to separate their plastics from their papers. Instead, all recyclables can be deposited without sorting into the same bin and left out for collection. All of these steps on campus show students that recycling is easy work to encourage those same students to continue recycling once they leave the school and eventually, they may also learn to incorporate more aspects of greener living into their day to day lives.
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