March 9, 2006
Recycing in residence halls: “A heck of an increase”
When the people at Housing & Food Services installed recycling bins on each floor of the residence halls in January, they believed it would result in an increase in recycling versus throwing items in the trash. They were right — and the results were even better than they had hoped.
The January total for combined mixed paper, cans and bottles was 12 tons more than in January of 2005; the February total exceeded February of 2005 by 8 tons.
“It’s a heck of an increase,” said Recycling Manager Pat Kaufman. “The difference between 2004 and 2005, by contrast, was only about a ton.”
The new recycling bins were the result of a collaboration between Housing and Food Services, Recycling and a student group called Students Expressing Environmental Dedication. According to Michael Glidden, Housing and Food Services facilities manager, the student group had asked for the bins about three years ago, but the department could not introduce them immediately because of concerns for safety and cost.
Students in the residence halls, Glidden said, have always been required to take their own trash to a waste room on their floor of the hall. But previously, those who wanted to recycle had to take their recyclables to the loading dock outside the building. The extra trip proved an obstacle for many students who otherwise would have recycled.
But having bins with large amounts of paper in the halls would have constituted a fire hazard. “The fire department wanted us to get aluminum containers that operate like mailboxes, so that the paper would be sealed inside after it was deposited,” Glidden said. “Those were prohibitively expensive and would have taken up a lot of space.”
Moreover, some of the residence halls dated to a time when sprinklers and door closers were not required and had not been installed. So Glidden embarked on a program of installing the fire safety features on every floor of every residence hall that didn’t already have them. The last hall was completed last summer.
Meanwhile, last spring, students from Students Expressing Environmental Dedication worked with Housing and Food Services to conduct a pilot study of recycling in one tower of McCarty Hall — involving about 380 students. The student volunteers promoted the effort with residents and also removed and weighed the recycling so that Glidden could get some statistics to extrapolate to the larger population.
The pilot program showed that students will participate,” Kaufman said. “It wasn’t just the little group of students who were interested in recycling.”
The results were encouraging enough that Housing and Food Services decided to go forward. Glidden and Kaufman consulted on the method of recycling, and decided that it was best to have a combined stream — that is, students could put all their recycling, from paper to cans and bottles, in one container. The residence halls’ combined recycling, Kaufman explained, is picked up by Waste Management, the company the University contracts with, on its regular cans and bottles route, and taken to their facility for sorting.
That contrasts with the paper and cardboard that is sorted in University offices, which goes to an on-campus facility.
“The combined recycling is a good fit for the residence halls because it matches what most people have in their residences in and around Seattle,” Kaufman said.
Recycling bins were placed in the waste rooms where students already go to empty their trash, Glidden said. He said the bins are on rollers so that custodians can easily roll the recycling containers to the residence hall docks for collection.
The new system was introduced to the residence halls with posters on every floor and door hangers for each resident’s room. The hangers explained where the recycling bins were and included a list of recyclable and nonrecyclable items for residents to keep as a reference.
The student group got involved again by holding special recycling promotions in each of the dining halls on campus. They featured quizzes on recycling and prizes for the winners.
The new recycling system came in just in time for the period when the city was set to enforce new legislation that requires residential and commercial customers to recycle. Starting in January of 2005, the city began tagging offenders and giving warnings; starting in January of this year, they began giving fines when trash contains 10 percent or more of recyclable materials.
The University has never been tagged, Kaufman said. But he and his staff have worked hard to make sure everyone is participating in the recycling program. Last fall, UW Recycling handed out more than 9,000 individual paper recycling boxes to faculty and staff. They also sold boxes at cost to fraternities and sororities, some of which had been tagged.
“Now that the residence halls are on board, I’m able to say that we have recycling bins available on every floor of every one of our buildings,” Kaufman said. “Convenience is really the name of the game.”
As for Glidden, he’s hoping for even better results in the future. “We brought this in midyear, and that’s always a challenge to get students to make the transition,” he said. “Next year, 50 percent of our residents will be new, so we may get even more from them.”
