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UH bellies up to the recycling bin

For health sophomore Samira Mortazavi, recycling is the only option. "If it's a bottle, I recycle it," she said/ The new bins' purpose is to inspire more students to do the same. | Mary Dahdouh/The Daily Cougar

For health sophomore Samira Mortazavi, recycling is the only option. “If it’s a bottle, I recycle it,” she said/ The new bins’ purpose is to inspire more students to do the same. | Mary Dahdouh/The Daily Cougar

The 2013 Solid Waste Plan brings UH the new BigBelly program, providing compacting containers that will be seen across campus throughout the year.

The containers will be a more efficient resource for the inner core of campus and will be placed along sidewalks and outside of buildings. The units are solar powered with a side for trash and recyclables.

“The trash container itself replaces six to eight of the trash containers around it because of the compactor,” said Manager of Central Facilities Service Area 2 James Ballowe.

“We’re on campus every day picking those up. With the solar power unit, it automatically sends information back telling us when it’s full. They’re (operated by) Wi-Fi and the recycling portion is the same. We’re able to pull the recycling and trash containers away from the areas of the BigBellies. It’s our plan to have 90 of these units out on campus by the summer.”

With 250 recycling bins on campus and 322 small blue bins in campus buildings, the BigBelly containers will replace some of the older recycling and trash cans. The recycling portion is single-stream, where students or faculty can throw in plastic, aluminum cans, paper, cardboard and other recyclables eliminating the need for multiple recycling bins.

All on campus housing facilities also have recycling bins. Cougar Village has bins on each floor.

The University works with a company called Greenstar Recycling, after switching from Evergreen Recycling, to save an operating cost. Evergreen would pick up the plastic, aluminum and cardboard, but it was up to Central Facilities to sort the materials.

“We ran three different trucks. Now we run one truck. It’s saving personnel cost and operational fuel,” Ballowe said.

“With Greenstar they allow us to take the material to them and they do all the sorting.”

Program Coordinator for Sustainability for University Services Leah Wolfthal said recycling is important to minimize the unwanted ecological effects of waste. She said her understanding is that reduction and reuse are often the desired first steps in terms of ecological impacts.

In Fiscal Year 2012, the University generated a total of 546.9 tons of recyclable material and 2,738 tons of trash. Ballowe said he believes that 70 percent of the trash being thrown out is recyclable.

“Our diversion rate has been 25 percent this year. That’s the amount of what we took out of the trash to recycle. Our goal is to get to 40 percent by 2020,” Ballowe said.

Campus recycling is picked up twice a week for each half of the campus with one route for Mondays and Wednesdays and another for Tuesdays and Thursdays, consisting of 10 workers.

“We have one truck with a three person crew that picks up building-to-building. We have others that empty bins in parking lots and three others that go through campus picking up the rest of the bins. Monday and Wednesday’s route generates a 4.1-ton average,” Ballowe said.

“Tuesday and Thursday generate 3.7 tons. It’s pretty much equal across campus. Friday’s route we go to the offside of campus and downtown — the areas we don’t usually get to during the week. We don’t collect on the weekends.”

There are multiple recycling programs geared toward getting students involved with the University’s mission to be a greener campus by 2020.

A new program, Adopt-A-Spot, where student organizations adopt an area of campus to assist with recycling and cleaning efforts, is an additional method of participation.

“Anyone that wants to help can help by keeping track of waste audits, and they can talk to me to assist us with that,” Ballowe said.

“We’re going to set up tables around campus so we can hopefully really get the students that are out there to really be part of the campus.”

However, UH offers a program for the more competitive organizations to participate.

“RecycleMania is an annual program in which organizations and departments compete with educational and engagement events on recycling reuse and reduction topics; any individual or group can participate in this,” Wolfthal said.

“Aside from that competition, I’d invite all students to read an article, book, listen to a radio program, do a self-reflection exercise about their own consumption and waste habits, because learning and asking the questions is often the best first step in getting involved.”

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6 Comments

  • I’m glad UH is trying to get students involved in keeping it green. Hopefully students will take their recycling efforts outside of campus to help the environment.

  • UH really needs a much better network of recycling bins on the west side of campus, like near the residential areas and Lynn Eusan Park. They are either not around, very far and out of the way to walk by, or some other issue. The back area of Cougar Village for instance has odd bin placements where they seem close together on one side, but non-existent near the parking lot and C-store. Which is why there’s so much cans or bottles littering the lot.

    Also it’s very sparse around the campus boundaries and you were always hard-pressed to find one around Robertson inside or outside the stadium. Hopefully the new stadium will more fully integrate recycling when it gets finished.

    I’m curious how the single stream works for paper mixed with other recyclables, because I thought wet or food stained paper material was usually rejected?

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