Thursday, April 30, 2009

SC Participates in RecycleMania




Southwestern College recently participated in a 10-week nationwide competition called RecycleMania. SC recycled nearly 21,000 pounds of cardboard, paper products, plastic, aluminum, glass, steel, and food products.

“I thought this would be a good way to set benchmarks in order to determine how much Southwestern actually recycles and to measure how much waste the college produces,” says Jason Speegle, director of Green Team Southwestern. “In years to come, we hope to take steps that will allow us to recycle more and waste less. This competition shows us how to measure our progress in both areas.”

According to the RecycleMania Web site (www.recyclemaniacs.org), RecycleMania is a friendly competition and benchmarking tool for college and university recycling programs to promote waste reduction activities to their campus communities.

More than 500 colleges and universities entered the competition. SC entered its name into three separate competitions during RecycleMania.

The first competition is called the Grand Champion division which measures the amount of trash that a campus produces versus the amount of recycling collected. SC finished 110th out of 206 schools with a cumulative recycling rate of 25.04% of its waste.

The second competition was called the Per Capita Classic in which the amount of recycling collected is measured per person on campus. SC finished 151st out of 293 schools with a recycling rate of 10.42 pounds per person (Kansas State finished 214th).

In the final Waste Minimization competition, schools measured how much waste (trash + recyclables) it produced per person. SC finished 63rd out of 148 schools with 41.59 pounds of waste per person.