Recycle Blog (Part I)

Greetings. Since this is my first real recycling blog post, I thought I'd start with my own thoughts on the topic. Recycling has been a habit ever since I was in high school and the product that is the most recycled in my house today, is plastic bottles. My roommates and I go through countless water and green tea bottles. We just bought more at Costco yesterday and I noticed how much we recycle just from the packages the bottles come in. We filled up our recycle bin half way just from the cardboard boxes. On the back of those boxes it said, "Recycle Please."

Now that I've given a little incite into what my exciting week in recycling was I want to discuss a little bit about what I found out about recycling on the UofA campus. I'm sure a lot of us have seen the big bins in the Student Union that are separated by garbage and recycling. That has seemed to be a good idea because I see a lot of people separating trash from recyclable materials and I'm sure they're not even noticing.

The UofA has dedicated a website to recycling paper. This site gives the do's and do not's of what kind of paper to recycle. One part of the site that through me off was in the non-recyclable category. I've always been taught to recycle any cardboard material, phonebook and newspaper but on the site those are listed in the don't recycle category. Then a little further down, it said to recycle newspapers and magazines. I might be missing something but at the same time all I could think of was, "make up your mind." The site is: http://www.fm.arizona.edu/recycle/Paper%20Guide.pdf

In January, the UofA took part in a ten week competitive activity called Recycle Mania. The site is: http://www.life.arizona.edu/recycling/recycle_mania.asp. The competition was also between different halls and apartment complexes. The school that won got a trophy and was recognized by various medias. Check out the Power Point presentation they had, it was interesting. I didn't see an advertisement forthe next competition but I'll keep an eye out for it.

Check out http://www.life.arizona.edu/recycling/opening.asp. This site is dedicated to Residence Life and recycling. The highlight of the website is presented below with statistical information on students moving into the Residence Halls and La Aldea Graduate Housing.

2004 - Total Collected: 17 tons of cardboard
The recycling we did at hall opening saved:
289 trees
118,201 gallons of water
7,871 gallons of oil
9,979 pounds of air pollution
52.02 cubic yards of landfill space
69,309 kilowatt hours of energy

2006 - Total Collected: 25.2 tons of cardboard and 1.3 tons of polystyrene
The recycling we did at hall opening saved:
433 trees
177,301 gallons of water
11,806 gallons of oil
14,968 pounds of air pollution
78.03 cubic yards of landfill space
103,963 kilowatt hours of energy

Have a good week folks and talk to you next week.