“We want to see more.” That’s the driving idea in The Maneater’s recent editorial, “One-third isn’t enough,” about recycling efforts at the University of Missouri. It arrived in tandem with an article titled “Black, gold and green: MU recycling efforts pay off.”
But here’s the real problem: we spend too much time talking about recycling and not enough time analyzing our waste.
Recycling gives easy numbers. However, campuses with stellar recycling don’t necessarily have the best resource management.
Look inside a paper bin at Ellis Library. Powerpoint slides printed full-page, or maybe three-to-a-page, forgotten in the printer. Emails with dates that could have easily been written in a notebook. Articles from the internet with all the comments and advertisements printed at the bottom, taking up multiple pages of the print job.
Look inside a residence hall’s beverage bin. Hundreds of individual plastic bottles, made from oil, used once and discarded. Residents could fill reusable bottles with water from drinking fountains or sinks. They could buy a 2-liter and use reusable cups. Sometimes on-campus events are culprits, when organizations hand out water bottles instead of using coolers.
The list goes on. I’m not calling to shut down all printers or to halt the sale of every plastic bottle. I’m saying, wouldn’t it help if we were all more mindful? Remember, recycling is the third ‘R’ in the Reduce – Reuse – Recycle phrase. If we paid more attention to the first two, we would have fewer problems with the third.
I love that the editorial encourages aggressive recycling measures. However, when The Maneater suggests better education, they could do their part and publish solutions. To address just some of the issues brought up, there are RecyclINK bins at dozens of locations on campus, nearly every grocery store in town collects plastic bags and there are plenty of permanent recycling bins on campus if apartments aren’t doing it.
Some points in the article allude to deeper problems on campus than recycling. Steve Burdic, the MU Sustainability coordinator is quoted saying, “Custodians don’t help much on recycling due to budget constraints. We are trying to find ways to save them time so they can get more involved.”
Even if a dozen bins were in every campus building, it shouldn’t take more than a few hours each week to tend them. Money made from those recycling efforts could help fund the labor. If Mizzou really can’t afford that in their budget, we have some serious issues.
A University of Washington facilities department spokesperson said the university’s efforts started with a sit-in on campus in 1970. Last year, the article reports, UW diverted 62% of its waste from landfills. MU started, slowly, with ResLife in 1998. In 2003 Sustain Mizzou helped catalyze a campus-wide recycling effort by collecting signatures and working with MSA to get a recycling coordinator. The Maneater missed that part, but that’s OK. The point is, time isn’t on our side, but we have excellent models such as UW from which we can learn better practices. It shouldn’t take us thirty years to catch up, because other universities have already found what works.
So how much learning are we actually doing? What is MU’s vision for recycling, and what can students do to help make those goals reality? I want to see numbers. How much does a recycling bin cost, and how long would it take to pay for itself? What is UW’s recycling-bin-to-student ratio, and what is ours? These are questions campus publications can answer, and I intend to get a reporter on it soon for [Footprint Magazine](http://footprintmag.wordpress.com).