Event for college Recylemania competition anything but trashy
By Mike Ludwig
Campus Reporter
February 4, 2008
Ohio University students wearing cardboard vests, garbage-bag skirts and newspaper dresses crammed into the Baker Center Ballroom for a “Trash Dance” on Friday night.
These dumpster dancers were celebrating the beginning of Recyclemania, an annual recycling competition that began as a friendly rivalry between OU and Miami (of Ohio) University, and has since become a national phenomenon involving 400 colleges and universities.
Recyclemania officially began Sunday and will continue for the next 10 weeks.
“I have been better at promoting recycling to the entire country than to our constituents,” joked recycling guru Ed Newman on Thursday. Newman is OU’s recycling and reuse manager.
According to Newman, Recyclemania was created in 2001 when Miami University and OU went head to head to see which school could recycle the most material within a given time period. The competition turned out so well that other schools were encouraged to join in, he said, and Recyclemania has practically doubled in size every year since.
Recyclemania’s Web site (www.recyclemaniacs.org) boasts that the competition resulted in 41.3 million pounds of recycled material in 2007 alone. The site estimates that recycling that amount of material prevented 15,583 tons of greenhouse gas emissions from entering the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases are often blamed for global warming, and the amount prevented by Recyclemania 2007 was equivalent to taking 12,367 passenger cars off the road.
Last year the OU Bobcats recycled 18.68 pounds of material per person on campus and placed 72nd out of 175 schools in the Per Capita Classic competition.
Miami University outdid OU (again) and placed fourth with 74.76 pounds per person, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University took first with a total of 101.12 pounds recycled per person.
The 2007 Recyclemania Grand Champion prize went to the Cougars of California State at San Marcos.
Newman said he hopes that the Bobcats can improve in 2008 and beat out there rivals, increase recycling rates on campus, and give him more ammunition when he deals with trash-talking recycling officials at other schools.
“We want to beat the 13 other schools in Ohio, we want to beat the MAC schools, and I’ve been talking crap to them, too,” Newman said.
Newman believes OU has plenty of room for improvement. He called OU a “heavily consumptive” campus and claimed that 70 percent OU’s recyclable waste is still going to landfills.
It’s important for students to be aware of how to recycle on campus, he said, but faculty and staff are part of our “team” as well.
“This is not a spectator sport, and everybody has got to pitch in,” Newman said.
Newman advised anyone who doesn’t have bins for recyclable waste in his or her office or dorm room to call custodial services and request them. Paper used in offices and classrooms is recyclable, and Newman said that OU’s faculty and staff should not throw any of their printer paper away.
“Everybody is groovin’ on this, and more people are trying to push it,” Newman said. “The bottom line, again, is trying to bolster our recycling rate.”
Glass, aluminum cans, cardboard, printer paper and newspaper can be recycled on campus, and other materials, such as scrap metal and palm pilots, can be recycled as well. For a full list of what can be recycled through OU’s recycling programs, visit www.facilities.ohiou.edu/recycle/recycling_campus.htm.
For more information on the Recyclemania competition, including the results from past years, visit www.recyclemaniacs.org.
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