By Julia Mericle
Staff Writer
Recyclemania is underway and will continue for the next eight weeks at St. Bonaventure.
The project, hosted by Tread Lightly, will promote recycling and sustainability at St. Bonaventure in an effort to benefit the local environment.
Each spring, colleges across the United States and Canada take on the recycling challenge. Schools are scored in several categories, including which school recycled the most per capita, received the best recycling rate as a percentage total waste and produced the least amount of combined trash and recycling.
Sister Suzanne Kush, adviser of Tread Lightly, said Recyclemania is a competitive way for colleges to get involved with recycling.
“It’s a friendly competition and benchmarking tool for college and university recycling programs to promote waste reduction activities to their campus communities,” Kush said.
Katrina Teeter, president of Tread Lightly, said the campus goal this year is to raise the recycling efforts to 25 percent of discarded materials, which will be a step up from the recycling percentage of 18.7 earned during Recyclemania last year.
The theme for the event this year is, “Feed the Wolf” and green Bona Wolf logos will be located around campus to identify recycling locations.
“It’s a matter of taking a moment to say ‘where am I going to throw this plastic container?’” Kush said.
Kush noted the importance of the Recyclemania project for the St. Bonaventure community.
“The event will remind students to be conscious of our home and our own well-being,” Kush said.
While it is often a subconscious reaction to toss bottles and other recyclable materials right in the trash for convenience, students, faculty and staff should consider how those items could be reused to create new items, Kush said
“For example, rugs can be recycled instead of taking hundreds of years to break down in landfills,” Kush said.
St. Bonaventure has the opportunity to recycle effectively because the university allows plastic containers numbered one to seven on the recycling symbol to be recycled on campus. This differs from the local transfer station and the hometowns of most students, where only numbers one and two are collected.
The results of the Recyclemania competition are updated each week so participating schools can evaluate where they stand. The winning schools in each category will be recognized on the Recylemania website and addressed in a national press release. Appropriately, the prevailing schools also receive an award created completely out of recycled materials, which they will display for the coming year.
Eric Gersbacher, a junior non-violence major, said students can take the time to recycle on campus to help the environment.
“All it takes is a few caring students to start teaching themselves and their friends to go the extra yard and put their recyclables in the proper places,” Gersbacher said.
