Habitat for Humanity loses funding

Pitt’s recycling program is having problems — all because of $20 a week.

Last Thursday,… Pitt’s recycling program is having problems — all because of $20 a week.

Last Thursday, that $20 a week drove the Student Government Board to deny funding for Pitt’s Habitat for Humanity chapter, which has helped run the recycling program at Pitt for about four years.

According to rules in the allocations guide, SGB should not fund any program that turns a profit for the sponsoring group. And according to Andy Satchwell, chair of SGB’s environmental committee, Habitat actually makes about $20 a week from the recycling program.

The group has attempted to appeal the decision, according to Habitat Vice President Steven Burch, but Habitat has exhausted its appeals and cannot request additional funding from SGB until the next budgeting period.

Habitat has a special grant that allows the group to receive money from Pittsburgh’s recycling center in exchange for turning in mixed recyclables — bags containing multiple types of recyclables, such as a mix of aluminum cans and glass bottles.

Recently, the environmental committee increased the number of on-campus pickup sites from one to 11. Lacking the manpower to do all the pickups, Habitat began paying a company to pick up the mixed recyclables.

But when the allocations committee looked at Habitat’s budget request last semester, the committee saw that the group was making a profit of about $20 each week.

“We did make money off of it,” Burch said, though he could not confirm exactly how much money the group made from the project. The group used the money to help send students on an annual spring-break trip to build a house somewhere in the United States. Another portion of the money went toward the group’s goal of raising $50,000 to build a house in Pittsburgh, he said.

The fundraising chair for Habitat, James Wong, said the recycling program was a “huge” part of the group’s annual fund raising.

The news of the trouble came as a surprise to many of the board members at Thursday night’s public meeting. Some of the board members explained that they voted against Habitat’s request because of the issue of raising funds, — not because they didn’t want to support the recycling program. They did not know the vote would cause problems for the recycling program, they said.

In his committee report, Satchwell defended SGB’s financial support of the group. He said he recognized that his job is not to allocate money, but that he thinks he should be consulted in decisions relating to his committee — including recycling.

“We’re having problems,” he said. “And we shouldn’t [be].”

Satchwell added that his concern was getting the recycling done, not the $20 being gleaned each week.

“Students in charge of waste management is a bad idea,” Satchwell said, adding that Pitt’s administration does help with some of the on-campus recycling, but not with mixed recyclables.

After the meeting, board members Liz Blasi, Charis Jones, Joe Pasqualichio and Lauren Evette Williams all stopped to talk to Satchwell about possible solutions, such as introducing a resolution for the board to vote on at a later meeting.

The tie between the fund raising and the recycling program is “one of the pains of bureaucracy,” Jones said in her closing remarks during the meeting, adding that the new problem is not any one person’s fault.

“That’s just the way the cookie crumbles when you work with lots of red tape,” she continued, adding that she would work to solve the problem.

Satchwell plans to set up a meeting with Facilities Management to find an alternate arrangement, though he added that getting a meeting with Facilities Management is difficult.

Burch said he thinks the recyclables are still being picked up, and that Pitt’s Habitat chapter is paying for the pickup out of the group’s personal account. But he was not sure. The future of the mixed recyclables pickup is unclear, because it may begin to cost the group more than it brings in.