The Orbis

Jenny Magill, president of SPEAR, said that the lack of recycling options available on campus has caused increased student support for more. "We now field more requests than ever for more recycling bins, increased pickup, a glass recycling program and ind [Click to enlarge]

Jenny Magill, president of SPEAR (Students Promoting Environmentalism and Recycling), points out that recycling on the Vanderbilt Campus is mostly student-driven. "While Vanderbilt has become more aware as a community of the importance of recycling and conservation measures and has made some improvements to its recycling program, the university still falls woefully short of adequately accommodating student wants and needs. Recycling bins are constantly overflowing, energy and resources are needlessly wasted, and a serious lack of funding makes it nearly impossible to move beyond the current flawed system."

Vanderbilt University has a responsibility to promote citizenship and environmentalism. However, the university seems to put only the minimum effort into recycling programs needed to quail any suggestions that Vanderbilt is not making environmentalism a priority. The core of the issue is that the Vanderbilt administration should be encouraging its students to recycle rather than students having to encourage the administration to do so.

According to Lis Wyatt, Director of General Services, Plant Operations, Vanderbilt is currently only willing to go so far as to provide merely a "viable, reliable system" of recycling on campus. Because recycling is a financial liability for Vanderbilt, the university sustains what seems to be a minimum for system requirements.  Check it out.

Four Big Problems...

Problem Number One

Vanderbilt University does not have a Department of Recycling. One employee of Plant Operation's General Services department empties every single non-residential recycling receptacle. He is responsible for the collection of recycling in each and every bin in every administrative and academic building. The bins in many places often overflow simply because of the sheer volume of recycling material.

Student groups collect the bins outside of dorms. Wilskills takes care of the bins around main campus, and Alpha Lambda Delta and Phi Eta Sigma take care of the Peabody dorm bins. The student involvement illustrates the fact that the students here at Vanderbilt care about the issue of recycling. Unfortunately, it is difficult for programs like Wilskills to recruit volunteers for this type of work, and they can only empty the bins about twice a week, which is far less than what is needed.

Problem Number Two

Even though many universities across the country support glass recycling programs, Vanderbilt does not. There are several reasons for this, including the attendant financial burden to the university. Additionally, concerns about student safety play a role since student volunteers must sort out incorrectly placed material in recycling bins, and sifting through broken glass may pose a safety hazard.

Problem Number Three

There are many successful environmental programs all across campus. Vanderbilt University, however, does little to inform students of their access to these programs.

For example, all across campus you can buy $1.00 (pre-tax) fountain drinks with free refills (same visit) if you use your own containers. You can fill up a Nalgene or a coffee mug of your choice rather than using another cup that has to be reprocessed before it is useful again (or worse, ends up in a landfill).  Vanderbilt has successfully employed this cost-cutting and conservation-minded program, but many students do not know about it.

Another program that is being successfully employed but under-publicized is the printer cartridge program. This program lets students and faculty mail in used inkjet cartridges to keep them out of the landfill. The best part is that SPEAR and Interhall get a small return from the endeavor.

All of the impetus and publicity for these programs arises from student initiative instead of from university commitment to environmentalism.

Problem Number Four

Vanderbilt is not trying its hardest to make the university a sustainable place. Yes, it is true that there is some initiative on the part of the university to make Vanderbilt more eco-friendly. For example, Vanderbilt has pledged to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) to certify all new residential buildings. However, there is still much work to be done.  For instance, many Vanderbilt buildings are needlessly kept lit all night and are made unnecessarily cold by plant ops. Additionally, many Vanderbilt dining facilities are not utilizing number one or number two plastics as much as possible, such as in take-out containers in the Pub and frozen yogurt cups in Rand. Moreover, there is no set university policy requiring individual departments to buy products made from recycled material.

The reason that Vanderbilt's recycling system is so deficient is that the university is only responds to what it thinks the students here care about. Mrs. Wyatt cites the fact that programs in the past, such as an indoor receptacle pilot program and a program of putting bins in dorm rooms, were scrapped because the university found that some students chose to turn them into general trash cans.

Luckily, the university is not averse to changing the system. Mrs. Wyatt says that the number one thing that could happen to improve the situation here on campus is students showing more enthusiasm for a better system. If the students make recycling and environmentalism high priority, then the university will make it a priority too. We can only hope that the Vanderbilt administration and its students can work together to create a truly modern and sustainable recycling program.

Caption: Jenny Magill, president of SPEAR, said that the lack of recycling options available on campus has caused increased student support for more. "We now field more requests than ever for more recycling bins, increased pickup, a glass recycling program and individual bins for dorm rooms," she said.

Wait, why recycle in the first place?

A short time ago, Chancellor Gee argued for reducing our consumption to conserve electricity. He is right-by limiting our consumption and practicing "green" thinking, we can do much to alleviate the growing problems of rising market prices and the fuel crisis. Recycling accomplishes the same end. For example, if the aluminum industry used recycling technologies to acquire aluminum, then it would save nearly 95 percent of the energy it would take to furnish the aluminum metal from raw ore. Similarly, the energy saved from choosing to recycle one plastic bottle could power your computer for 25 minutes. Recycling has positive environmental effects as well, since electricity need not be produced to make new bottles from raw material.

Recycling also cuts down on the amount of natural resources wasted. If every Vanderbilt student were to recycle just 3.2 ounces of paper today, the resources saved would equate to:

€¢ 17 trees

€¢ 6953 gallons of water

€¢ 463 gallons of oil

€¢ 587 pounds of air pollution

€¢ 3.06 cubic yards of landfill space

€¢ 4077 Kilowatt-hours of energy

For more information on Vanderbilt recycling visit http://www.vanderbilt.edu/recycle or attend the weekly SPEAR meeting, Thursdays 7:30 PM, Sarratt 189

Sources: http://www.resourcefulschools.org/html/facts.html; http://www.thomasrecycling.com/kids.html

Article Tools