Nov. 19, 2009

By the end of the fall semester, residents of East Campus housing will have received bright blue recycling totes as CSU Monterey Bay moves into phase two of a state grant.

The university used money from the California Department of Conservation to buy 3,100 totes last spring. The grants are intended to promote recycling and are financed with unclaimed refunds on beverage containers. None of the money comes from the state's general fund.

During the summer, 900 totes were delivered to the residence halls. Each room got one tote; the six-person suites in the North Quad complex received two each.

Yvonne Perez and Sarah Goumaa, students in Professor Suzy Worcester's service learning class, and a pair of students from Seaside High School, are in the process of distributing 1,500 of the blue totes to apartments in East Campus. They are also adding stickers to some of the outside recycling bins and distributing fliers containing information on recycling.

The students are collaborating with Alliance Residential Company, manager of East Campus housing, and Waste Management, the university's garbage collector, to ensure consistent and comprehensive recycling information is distributed.

"This is a great example of how collaborations among students, staff and faculty can help make improvements on campus," said Anya Spear, campus planner.

"Without the CSUMB and Seaside High students, I don't know how we would have been able to complete this project. State funds to implement it are currently frozen."

The goal of the project is to get young people to pay attention to where they throw their trash. Each tote comes with a guide that explains what kinds of materials to recycle - bottles, cans, plastic, cardboard and paper - and a reminder to carry the full totes to the recycling dumpsters.

"We have, in the United States, been establishing a recycling infrastructure for three decades, but when we look at rates, we are not improving," Kate M. Krebs, executive director of the non-profit National Recycling Coalition, told The New York Times.

National data shows that recycling overall is flat, but it is especially poor among college-age people, even though they grew up with recycling as a widespread practice. "When you look at demographics, the 18- to-24-year-old sector makes little effort to recycle," Krebs said.

Last May, Spear, campus facilities director Bob Brown, their staff and representatives from Waste Management conducted a "trash audit" of dumpsters located near all 11 residence halls. At the company's Castroville facility, they sorted through a sample of 1.26 of the five tons of garbage. They found that nearly 16 percent of the material (by weight) was recyclable. Plastic, aluminum, tin, paper, cardboard and glass had been tossed in the trash containers instead of being recycled.

"We're hoping that by putting bins in the rooms and apartments, we'll have a better percentage" of discarded items being recycled, Spear said. "They know recycling is the 'right' thing to do; we're trying to make it the 'easy' thing to do."

Another waste audit will be conducted next year, to see if there has been an improvement.

Read an earlier story.