By: Ella Miller
On a cold Thursday morning of winter term, juniors Lukas Graff and Ethan Huebsch saddle onto one of the new Kalamazoo College compost and recycling golf carts. These carts are equipped with headlights, blinkers, and a large trunk space, to ensure that students can safely navigate campus and have space to collect discarded items. Graff and Huebsch both completed a certification to drive these carts, which is required before students can begin their field work. Bumping along the brick road of Academy Street in big winter coats and baseball caps, Graff and Huebsch spend two hours collecting recycled items from several buildings on campus, including the field house, facilities, the fitness center, and the natatorium.
Reduce, reuse, and recycle are the three r’s taught to increase sustainability efforts at an individual level. Reducing and reusing occurs in the home, while recycling is done through outside facilities. Curbside recycling was introduced in the United States in the 1960s, but it was not until April 22, 1970, when the first Earth Day celebration inspired Americans to decrease their impact on the increasingly full landfills. Since this recycling movement began, recycling rates have been steadily increasing each decade, with recycling practices being taught and encouraged to all, including students and faculty at Kalamazoo College. Recycling has successfully prevented 60 million tons of waste from going into landfills annually and thus reduced greenhouse gas emissions from landfill incarceration, which are responsible for five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the practice of recycling does not come without limits. K, while actively working to decrease its environmental footprint, has experienced many difficulties regarding its sustainability practices and student awareness of the limits of recycling.
During their recycling route, Graff and Huebsch walk through each building on campus, emptying all blue buckets into large, blue recycling bags. Some of the larger bins have bags already prepared to be removed, but the smaller bin’s items need to be dumped into the bags or removed by hand. Nonrecyclable items, like plastics with food waste or EPS foam, commonly known as styrofoam, are typically spotted by the student recyclers at this step and placed into their proper waste bins. Some recycling spots on campus feature a green recycling bin as well as a blue bin, with the green designated for cans and glass and the blue for paper and cardboard products. These bins are outdated because recycling no longer needs to be sorted before it is collected by recycling facilities. Through this single-stream recycling, or mixed recycling, all recyclable items, including paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass, can be collected together. These outdated sorting bins have been slowly replaced on campus by singular blue bins with a white recycling symbol featuring three arrows forming a circle. When collecting recycling, Huebsch and Graff combine the contents of the green bins which have yet to be updated with the other mixed recyclables that they have collected.
Since recycling became a mainstream practice, developments have been made to ensure that the process is as easy and accessible as possible. While originally recycling needed to be sorted by the consumer between aluminum products, glass products, plastic products, and paper products, it can now all be recycled together through single-stream recycling. Items recycled through single-stream recycling are collected by large trucks and then brought to a materials recovery facility to be sorted. At this facility, the combined items are sorted both manually and with machinery into like-groups. Non-recyclables are sent to landfills, while the viable items are sold to manufacturers to use as material to craft new products.
With the burden of sorting items removed for the consumer, it seems that recycling would be simpler than ever. The unexpected issue arises when people try to recycle too much. Recycling trucks are equipped with cameras which can detect non-recyclable items, such as Styrofoam, pizza boxes, or plastic bags. If even one of these items is detected in a recycling load, the entire load is then contaminated and sent to the landfill instead of a materials recovery facility. In 2020, 2.39 tons of recycled materials had to be discarded due to an unusually high percentage of unrecyclable material being collected from recycling bins during the COVID-19 pandemic, when an increased number of people staying home resulted in increased amounts of household trash. Kalamazoo College receives notifications and fines of up to $250 when loads are contaminated from recycling picked up at K facilities. Facilities manager Marcie Weathers urges students, “when in doubt, throw it out,” to prevent recurring contamination of recycling loads.
On their route back to the facilities garage, Graff and Huebsch pull the cart over to inspect a large grey bin outside of a brick building. As they walk up the flight of concrete steps to the bin, Huebsch says, “We can’t really tell if this is a recycling bin, to be honest.” Still, the workers show their dedication by checking the bin to make sure that no recyclables are left uncollected. When Graff lifts the lid, they see that the bin is completely empty. Having completed their tasks, the boys hop back into the golf cart, ready to complete their last step in their recycling process.
Aside from the stray unidentifiable bin, recycling bins on campus are uniform. The bins are short and blue with a recycling symbol on their side, and can be found in the library, Hicks Center, and in each classroom. Students living on campus also are supplied with recycling bins in each of the dorms. Students typically recycle items that are easy to recycle and frequently used, like cans and clean plastics. When unsure about what can and cannot be recycled, students typically resort to a Google search. “I think it’s a little unclear what we should be recycling,” campus resident and student Madelyn Portenga, ‘26, said. “They have the recycling and compost bins, I’m not sure if everyone knows what goes where.” For students looking to get involved with conservation efforts on campus, one way to learn about recycling quickly is applying to work as a student recycling employee. There is also a student-run conservation club on campus, the Environmental Conservation Organization (ECO).
Now that all recyclables are collected, Graff and Huebsch need to unload the bags from the back of the golf cart, pouring them all out into the large, blue, metal recycling bin behind the facilities building
. Originally, these bags were recycled as well, but facilities recently received a notification from the recycling service that they should not be. Graff climbs the side of the bin while Huebsch hands him bags, ensuring that no product misses the bin. This process is a last chance for students to identify potential nonrecyclable items and remove them from the bin. The bin is already filled to the brim with mostly paper and cardboard products, so Graff pushes the contents down with his foot as they are added, to ensure that they do not blow away in the cold, February wind. One by one, they empty all the bags they have collected. One the bin is full, Graff hops down and closes it. Their shift is done.
Education and awareness are the key focuses for the future of recycling at Kalamazoo College. The Climate Action Plan Committee, comprised of faculty, staff, and students, has been committed to projects which can help divert waste away from landfills. The main project regarding recycling that this committee is working on currently involves printing large stickers for each of the recycling bins, with detailed pictures indicating what can and cannot be recycled. The Environmental Stewardship Center is awaiting the arrival of these stickers, hoping to apply them to each bin in the public spaces at the beginning of spring term.
Dr. Binney Girdler, Kalamazoo College Biology professor with an interest in conservation, offers a perspective on recycling for students to consider. Recycling is a great way to reuse resources and prevent the depletion of non-renewable resources like aluminum, by reusing the materials that have already been gathered from the Earth instead of extracting more. To have the biggest positive environmental impact, Girdler suggests that people should avoid plastics when they can because they are difficult to recycle effectively due to their wide variety of forms, and the production of plastics has an especially negative impact on the environment. Avoiding plastic is extremely difficult in current society, where nearly everything is made of plastic or sold wrapped in plastic. The reason that plastic production is so bad for the environment is because plastics are made of natural gas, which is burned off as waste during production, contributing to the global issue of air pollution. These natural gases, however, are inexpensive and available, making them enticing for corporations. The low cost of plastic products makes them the easy choice for consumers as well. “We are not literally paying the cost with our dollars, but we are paying the cost as a society,” Girdler said. While recycling does not perfectly offset the cost of these damages to the environment, it is a way to start trying.
Having completed their shift, Graff and Huebsch return the golf cart to the facility garage and the keys to a locker within facilities. The job is rewarding, even though it sometimes involves getting your hands dirty, sorting trash from recycling. “If we don’t pick it up, I don’t know if it would get picked up,” Huebsch said. “Then it’s probably just garbage.” By getting involved in the recycling process, these students can take charge to prevent contamination of recycling loads. “I feel like I’m doing something,” said Graff.
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