Knocking back the final dregs of coffee, you look around for a bin to chuck the empty cup in. But which bin?
According to Sean Smith, the head of UP’s three-person recycling department, where that coffee cup lands affects the system he oversees.
“It kind of handicaps us when things end up in the wrong bin,” Smith said. “You might only get one person dumping the wrong item into a container, but the spills and messes slow us down.”
Coffee cups are in fact one of the items destined for the landfill. But a slew of other materials – thousands of pounds of glass, plastic, tin, paper, wood, cardboard, electronics, heavy metals and even Styrofoam – are annually sorted and recycled by Smith and his crew.
Despite the sheer amount of material cycling through this system, the process is mostly invisible.
“That’s the goal,” Smith said. “We want the recycling department to provide a green service to the community, but you don’t notice it, or know how it works. We’ll take care of it.”
Before he was hired in 1997 as UP’s first full-time recycler, Smith said the University recycled about 5,000 pounds of paper per year. Everything else was tossed in the garbage.
Over the years, Smith has worked with Eckert Sanitary, a disposal contractor, and the University to implement a strong recycling program. Now, almost 100 tons of material are recycled at UP each year.
Part of that involves strategically arranging an assortment of recycling containers across campus. The department works to saturate the campus as much as they can aesthetically, and tries to squeeze bins into the corners and nooks of buildings.
Since the program is ultimately run by students and their choices, Smith said the rule of thumb in college is to have a recycling container by every garbage can.
“It may not be next to you when you want to get rid of your Coke can,” he said. “But if you look around, you’ll find a recycling bin.”
Overall, Smith said there’s a fairly high rate of compliance when it comes to people choosing which bin to dispose items in. But both he and the department’s student worker, senior Bryan O’Dowd, who helps pick up the paper recycling, said there are occasional mix-ups, which can cause delays in the pick-up process.
“It’s pretty good for the most part,” O’Dowd said. “But it would be nice if people would think before throwing their pizza boxes in the paper bin.”
Something like a juice container or a half-full coffee cup can seriously slow down the department’s pace, because an entire bin might get soaked, meaning time is wasted cleaning it out. Since Smith, O’Dowd, and the other full-time worker, Nicholas Forrester, try to work their way across the entire campus every few days, that’s a meaningful setback.
At the end of the day, however, the recycling department runs smoothly. And although Eckert doesn’t have records from 15 years ago when the program was expanding, they’ve reported a sharp drop off in garbage disposal cost.
In the future, more bins may be added to empty stretches of campus, but Smith said most won’t even notice – and that’s the goal. He and his small department will keep making their rounds quietly, keeping the program rolling along.
“It’s a fun job,” Smith said. “I’m one of the strange people in this world who actually likes doing this, because I know I’m doing something good. It’s always nice walking around campus, meeting different people.” Nastacia Voisin is a reporter and copy editor for The Beacon. She can be reached at voisin15@up.edu.
