What could be a better way for a university to increase the amount of material recycled than participating in a nation-wide recycling competition?
The University of New Hampshire, along with over 600 other colleges and universities from around the nation, will be participating in RecycleMania, a 10-week long competition to see which school in the country can recycle the most.
In a time when the environment is a heavy concern for many, universities all over wonder what they can do to make the nation more environmentally friendly.
RecycleMania, which is a project created by the College and University Recycling Council (CURC), judges recycled material gathered by participating schools in several different categories. Those categories include largest amount of recyclables per capita, largest amount of total recyclables, least amount of trash per capita, and the highest recycling rate.
The RecycleMania project is headed by a six-person steering committee that is responsible for making the rules and governing the competition. The group is comprised of professionals from universities from all around the nation whose areas of expertise relate to waste reduction and sustainability issues.
Michele Chapman, the university’s special projects coordinator for the Biodiversity Education Initiative and the Climate Education Initiative, heads the RecycleMania project and keeps a quantitative track of all recycled material throughout campus. Chapman said that the university’s hope is that RecycleMania will not only help in getting more students to recycle now, but also help change their attitudes and views toward recycling in the future, after the competition is over.
“The point is that during that period all of the schools compete in not only how much they recycle, but can they minimize their waste as well,” Chapman said. “The thought is that it’s going to change the behavior beyond the 10-week period.”
The competition started on Jan. 17, about a week before UNH students moved back onto campus for the start of the spring semester. According to Chapman, the first few weeks are used as a trial run for the schools, and the competition itself didn’t begin to be judged until this past Monday. The end of the competition is March 27.
The different “per capita” sections are to give smaller schools with low enrollment numbers a chance at claiming the overall prizes. Since universities like Ohio State, with an enrollment of about 40,000 students, are participating, the per capita competitions deal with how much on average each student at the school recycles. There’s also a huge “gorilla” prize, as Chapman put it, to the school that recycles the most in the 10-week span, which will likely go to one of the larger competitors.
Each school being judged has a representative that accounts for the cumulative quantity recycled each week. Chapman is the UNH rep, and says that she and the other judges around the country record specific types of recyclables and measure their amounts weekly.
“I tell them [the RecycleMania governing committee] how many pounds of paper we recycle a week,” Chapman said. “Also how many pounds of corrugated cardboard, how many pounds of co-mingled plastic and aluminum cans, and then how much total waste that we make. Then I just send them those numbers in pounds every week and they calculate who wins.”
RecycleMania began as a small competition in 2001 between two schools, but grew exponentially each year. UNH began participation several years ago, and did fairly well in the Grand Champion Competition Division, finishing 68th out of 206 schools in 2009.
According to the results, just over 69.4 million pounds were collectively recycled or composted by over 4.7 million students and 1.1 million faculty and staff members throughout the country last year.
However, despite the competitiveness of the overall project, Chapman said that the main goal is to promote the event and the idea of recycling in general. Flyers and posters are displayed all over campus, and last Saturday at the Whittemore Center was a “green” hockey game, in which announcements were made, and t-shirts and hats were passed out in order to promote recycling.
Sophomore Ian Ketchum said that despite the promotional efforts, he has not heard of RecycleMania, but does recycle nonetheless.
“I recycle because it’s important to help save the environment from ourselves,” he said, adding that the idea of a competition would and does make him want to recycle a bit more.
“It’s all about promotion,” Chapman said. “There’s really not a whole lot else we can do but to tell people to recycle and decrease their waste.”
Although no big promotional events have been planned for the next few weeks, Chapman urges students to pay attention to the flyers and advertisements to learn more about the event. And for the next five weeks, UNH students are encouraged to recycle anything that can be reused that will also help out in the competition.
All information about the rules and guidelines of the event can be found at recyclemaniacs.org/index on the RecycleMania homepage.
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