You may have seen those blue bins all over campus that state “FAU Recycles!” But don’t believe everything you read because, actually, FAU’s Jupiter campus doesn’t. And they haven’t for years.
“It’s not cost-effective,” said Evan Cross, assistant director of FAU’s physical plant in charge of maintenance on campus. “There’s a cost for [waste] pickup, and our volume of recyclables is too small for them to come and collect regularly.”
So what happens to everything in the blue recycle bins? Once a day the janitorial staff dumps these bins into dumpsters along with the non-recyclable trash.
“No one ever told us to separate the bins,” said a custodian at the Jupiter campus. He says he was instructed to throw everything into the dumpsters.
So how long has FAU not been recycling? No one really knows.
“We were told that we were recycling last year, but that’s what we were told,” said Sarah Fannin, president of FAU’s Environmental Club. “Then last semester we asked again if we were recycling, and we weren’t. It’s been on and off again since I’ve been here.” Fannin is now a senior.
Paul McCurdy, founder of the Environmental Club, said he heard that the recycling had been off and on since the campus opened.
The Jupiter campus opened in the fall of 1999, which would have given campus officials seven years to obtain a steady recycling program. The FAU Waste Minimization Plan, dated Dec. 2002, even states, “It is prudent to manage all wastes as efficiently as possible.” It suggests that this happen through waste reduction, treatment and recycling.
FAU’s Department of Environmental Health and Safety, who founded the minimization plan, would not comment and suggested that questions go to Cross instead – even though he had already been asked about the issue.
“When I found out about it [that FAU didn’t recycle] I was pretty upset,” said Fannin.
Hoping to voice their concerns and change FAU’s non-recycling ways, members of the Environmental Club met with university officials on Oct. 19 at the Jupiter campus. Officials from student housing, FAU’s physical plant and Jupiter’s maintenance crew all attended the “recycling conference.”
“We really would like to go ahead with recycling on this campus,” said Fran Devanzo-Shrader, the director of campus planning and administration, who introduced herself at the conference as the liaison for the plant and the campus.
Although everyone at the meeting agreed that it would be nice to have the Jupiter campus recycling, there were still the issues of cost and the small volume of recyclables to contend with.
“We don’t accumulate an efficient amount [of recyclables] to have someone come pick them up,” said Daniel Rodenberger, the maintenance manager at the Jupiter campus.
After discussing many possibilities, the group decided to comingle the recyclables from all of the buildings on campus, once a month, into one bin that will hold eight cubic yards of recyclables. This way the bin will have stockpiled enough recyclables during the month to warrant a pickup. They also agreed to split the costs – $75 a month for the pickup of recyclables and a $120 set up fee – between the three groups.
The Environmental Club agreed to start advertising to get students recycling. They say they hope to obtain more habitual recyclers. Though most of the recycling is low, paper is one thing that students usually recycle.
Another concern addressed at the convention was that students are cross-contaminating between the recycling and trash bins.
“There’s definitely a problem with students using recycling bins as trash receptacles,” said McCurdy, the founder of the Environmental Club. “The janitors shouldn’t have to separate the trash from the recyclables.”
Members of the Environmental Club say they hope to begin their recycling awareness program as soon as possible, but they’ve held off because the new recycling program agreed on by university officials still doesn’t have a commencement date.
When asked when this program can be expected to begin, each group had a different answer: by Jan. 1, sometime in the summer and as soon as possible. For now not even the people in charge of the new program know the outcome or even the expected date of this plan.
