Recyclemania fosters friendly competition for good cause

Liza Boulet is a recyclemaniac, but had no idea what RecycleMania was two years ago.

Boulet, now a student sustainability coordinator at Pitt’s Office of Sustainability, said she’d been sitting by Einstein Bros. Bagels as a sophomore in Posvar Hall when someone “wearing an astronaut-looking suit” strolled by.

 “I had no idea what was going on, but then I saw them start to go through the trash,” Boulet, also a senior majoring in environmental studies, said.

During trash audits, an event within RecyleMania, students dressed up in hazmat suits delve into campus trash and determine what percentage of items are recycleable.

RecycleMania is an ongoing and annual eight-week-long competition between U.S. colleges that focuses on reducing and recycling waste produced by consumers. This year’s competition began on Feb. 2 and will conclude on March 29.

Boulet said Pitt is in its sixth year participating in this competition.

At Pitt, RecycleMania volunteers — called recyclemaniacs — are typically students from organizations such as Free the Planet and Students for Sustainability, but others come from a sustainability class in the Department of Geology and Planetary Science.

According to RecycleMania’s website, the competition is split between eight different categories: grand champion, per capita, gorilla, waste minimization, paper, bottles and cans, corrugated cardboard and food-service organics. 

Each category has a winner at the end of the competition.

In the Atlantic Coast Conference, 12 of the 15 schools in the conference participate, excluding Wake Forest, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech. It’s a way to categorize and compare the University to other schools in its conference, according to Boulet.

According to RecycleMania’s website, after the third week of competition, Pitt is ranked third in the gorilla category, fifth in paper and 10th in corrugated cardboard. In the grand champion category, Pitt is in 34th place overall and first place in the ACC. As of time of publication, Pitt has recycled 10.155 pounds of recyclable material per capita.

RecycleMania has consolidated efforts from a number of people across campus. 

Laura Zullo, senior manager of energy initiatives at Pitt’s Facilities Management Department, which is responsible for managing waste and recycling on campus, said the department has led Pitt’s RecycleMania efforts.

Facilities Management also works alongside Housing, Food Services, Residence Life, Surplus Property, the Athletics Department and student groups such as Free the Planet. 

“Facilities Management personnel are responsible for tallying quantities for certain materials, while other weights are supplied by our waste and recycling haulers,” Zullo said in an email. “They also make and install the promotional banners and signage you might see in campus buildings.”

Zullo said Facilities Management collects recycled materials from all educational and general facilities as well as residence halls and most athletic or recreational facilities. 

According to Zullo, Pitt recycled more than 1,420 tons of materials — almost 42 percent of the University’s total waste — in 2013.

“We want to make sure that the Pitt community is aware that we have an aggressive recycling program and hopefully encourage faculty, staff and students to think before they throw things in the trash,” Zullo said.

Madeleine O’Connor, a communications associate at Keep America Beautiful, which provides program management at RecycleMania, said that 461 schools consisting of more than 5.3 million students and more than 1.2 million faculty and staff are participating in RecycleMania this year in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Canada. 

The University of North Carolina, located in Chapel Hill, N.C., is a tough competitor, Boulet said, because the university is very environmentally focused.

Amy Preble, the recycling coordinator at the UNC Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling, said sustainability has been a focus on campus for decades. 

She said the university has held a competition for 20 years called the Green Games between residence halls that begins in August and concludes at the end of April with an awards ceremony.  

Through the competition, students earn points by conducting  programming with a focus on the environment. Preble said the competition motivates residence hall communities to put on “environmental fairs” in their halls to earn points.

Several programs students engage in at UNC are weekly recycling drives (where students go floor-to-floor and collect recyclables from students), plastic bag recycling drives and an e-waste drive around spring break.

“During the e-waste drive, we set up and have students get rid of what they don’t want,” Preble said. “We collect e-waste from students so they can have a one-stop, convenient way to recycle that.”

Preble also spoke about the benefits of bringing RecycleMania to universities as a tool to benchmark their recycling efforts.

“RecycleMania is a useful tool just to see how you’re doing, because when you want to know how your school stacks up against institutions, we feel like we’re doing a good job, but don’t really have the facts to back that up,” Preble said. 

Other organizations, such as Free the Planet, a student-run group at Pitt, play large roles in raising awareness around campus for RecycleMania.

According to Sage Lincoln, business manager of Free the Planet, the organization’s goal is to increase environmental awareness on campus and engage in local and national campaigns and public-awareness events.

Free the Planet has been involved in RecycleMania for four years and works with Facilities Management to communicate the department’s goals for sustainability with students. 

“We really want to change people’s recycling habits on campus,” Lincoln, a sophomore majoring in environmental geology, ecology and evolution and urban studies, said.

Lincoln said there are several items that most people wouldn’t think are recyclable. 

Disposable coffee cups and soda cans, according to Lincoln, were among the most common recyclable items the organization collected in a waste audit it hosted on Feb. 5. Members of Free the Planet held the waste audit in the Schenley Quad and delved into campus trash in hazmat suits to determine what percent of the trash was recyclable.

In an effort to continue the improvement of RecycleMania each year, new event categories have been added.

According to Zullo, RecycleMania introduced a new event this year called Game Day Basketball. 

At the event, which was held at the Petersen Events Center on Sunday, Feb. 23 during the Pitt vs. Florida State basketball game, student volunteers set out special recycling bins and signs and stood near them during the game to teach people what was recyclable and what was not. After the game, the volunteers collected the leftover recyclables from the Oakland Zoo section, where students sit during basketball games.

Jess McDonald, a senior majoring in environmental studies and a student sustainability coordinator, said such events at sporting events should drive RecycleMania’s objective home. 

“We expect a huge improvement in green areas in Pitt athletics because we collected so many recyclables,” McDonald said.

Similarly to the Game Day event, McDonald said recyclemaniacs will stand in dining facilities on campus to teach students how to recycle during Recyclemaniacs Week from March 17 to 21.

Another goal of recyclemaniacs, according to Lincoln, is working with Facilities Management to increase the number of recycling bins in dining facilities on campus.

O’Connor said in an email that many aspects contribute to a green campus.

“The different categories allow different schools to be recognized for their various strengths,” O’Connor said. 

 O’Connor cited one category that is new to this year’s RecycleMania competition, Film Plastics, which focuses on recycling plastic films for reuse by retailers.

She also said RecycleMania can teach recycling coordinators and student clubs to educate students, staff and faculty about what can and can’t be recycled on campus and what actions they can take to reduce their waste.

“Schools like getting involved because RecycleMania provides a fun framework in which they can hold events that draw attention to the waste reduction, recycling and composting programs on campus,” O’Connor said.