A 10-week competition that began Jan. 18, Recycle Mania is a national competition between colleges and universities to promote waste reduction habits and environmentally friendly practices. Amherst is no stranger to the competition, finishing in the top 10 nationally and first in Massachusetts last year, losing only to Connecticut College in the NESCAC. On average, Amherst recycled five pounds more per person than Williams and other NESCAC schools. The College was also one of the founders of the competition, according to Five College Recycling Manager Roger Guzowski.
“It originally started almost 20 years ago as a Five College competition,” Guzowski remembered. “I took [it] years ago to the National Recycling Coalition that was looking to do something similar with colleges around the country. Some schools said we’d like to try how it works. I basically taught them how we did our competition and a year later they invented this competition called Recycle Mania, which is basically what we had been doing for a decade before that. Since then it’s grown into a national competition.”
The benefits of Recycle Mania are evident in the lowered costs and reduced impact on the environment; last year, Amherst saved nearly $2,000 in landfill fees and decreased its greenhouse gas emissions by over 80 tons of carbon dioxide.
Recycle Mania also helps reduce the amount of trash the custodial staff has to deal with during the final weeks of the semester, a time traditionally cluttered with trash.
“Everyone waits till they move out at the end of the year and there’s this mountain of paper when there’s the least staff to deal with it,” Guzowski said. “Anything we can do now, if you have old notes you’re not going to use again, or that stack of Wall Street Journals you’ve accumulated, we’d love to have that stuff now instead of at the end of the year.”
Thus far in the competition, Amherst has fallen short of its winning quantities from last year. In the first four weeks of the contest in 2008, the College averaged 4.01 pounds of recycling per person, whereas this year, the average is only 2.62 pounds per person. To increase this number, Guzowski encourages students to be more conscious of their waste during parties and social functions.
“One of the things that we encourage for students is that if ... you know you’re going to have a party or friends over, you know you’re going to have a bunch of extra sodas, grab a couple of extra bags or recycling bins,” Guzowski suggested. “That’s where we see most of the recycling go into the trash. The little recycling bin they’ve got fills up in the first 10 minutes and folks stop recycling. Even if the stuff is bagged next to the recycling bin, it’d be a great help for us.”