Sustainable Recycling on College Campuses

Geographic shapes organized to represent a landscape of (from left to right) a river, a windmill, a group of trees, and two mountains. The sky contains a round yellow sun to the left, and a bundle of clouds to the right.
Picture from Marc Manhart on Pixabay. Image Description: Geographic shapes organized to represent a landscape of (from left to right) a river, a windmill, a group of trees, and two mountains. The sky contains a round yellow sun to the left, and a bundle of clouds to the right.

Have you ever wanted to practice more sustainable efforts in your day to day life? Do you have a passion for saving the environment around you? Well it’s not as difficult as it seems. You can practice these efforts every day with the help of your college campus.

Many students are aware of recycling programs that go on around campus and other locations, specifically because of those blue bins specific to place recyclable items in. In grade school we learn on a surface level how to “reuse, reduce, and recycle,” at least as much as 10 year olds can understand. At that point in our learning, the concept of recycling was introduced to us as a form of a hands-on activity, and making something new with what you already have, or with something that you would throw away.

While these hands-on activities were an important skill for young students, schools saw the bigger benefit to these recycling programs. According to Sustainability Practice and Education on University Campuses and Beyond by Kumar Ashok and Kim Dong -Shik, schools’ realized the benefits of these programs, including pollution prevention, reducing costs of using the landfills, and saving raw materials. Schools are a prime example of an establishment that saw the benefit from both a business and education perspective.

One of the most common ways you can be conscious about recycling for sustainable efforts is placing your recyclable bottles, cans, and packaging from your food and drinks you consume. It is easy to save your packaging and throw it into the blue recycle bins. Once it is in the bin, it is off your hands and you can walk away knowing you are helping save more waste from going to the landfills, and that material can be used to make new things.

In Sustainability Practice and Education on University Campuses and Beyond, the authors write about how colleges can contribute to making a successful recycling program on campus. If your campus does not have a reliable program or you want to suggest improvements to a preexisting one, then here are some things you should keep in mind.

Campus support plays a big role in the success or failure of a recycling program. If there is no visible effort being shown to students, then the students have no motivation or inspiration to value it enough to take part. Additionally, if the campus doesn’t have recycling bins or areas to take your recyclables, then it makes it significantly more difficult to responsibly dispose of these things, especially for students without cars. The research article discusses how the consistency of having the same size, color, and type of bin can visually help students with identifying these opportunities.

Another thing that helps motivate students to participate is informing them of how recycling is a sustainable effort they can participate in and how the process works. One way this can happen is posting infographics around trash disposal areas with blue bins. When displayed correctly, people can quickly read the information on the sheet and it can play into their decision to throw away their trash without thinking, or to sort out the different items.

Overall, these efforts from students and the colleges themselves work together to impact our environment and try to prevent so much waste from being put into our landfills and littered. Keeping everything much cleaner and safer.

If you participate in other recycling you think are worth sharing with others, feel free to leave a comment. And if you think your university should have more recycling efforts and programs, be the catalyst and be a community leader to start up these programs!

References

Ashok, K., & Dong -Shik, K. (2017). Sustainability Practice and Education on University Campuses and Beyond. Bentham Science Publishers.

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