From Jan. 20 to March 20, Longwood will partake in a competition with colleges all over the nation in an effort to recycle more. Longwood has been involved in Recyclemania since 2008. Recyclemania is one of the programs of RecycleMania, Inc., a non- profit 501c3 organization.
“There were 605 colleges [that took place in Recyclemania] last year,” said Kelly Ann Martin, sustainability coordinator of the Office of Sustainability.
Last year saw the participation of 6.2 million students and staff in the nationwide competition. That resulted in 94.9 pounds being collected and compacted, and greenhouse gasses saw a reduction of 148,197 mT (millions of tons) of CO2. Over half of the campuses that participate in Recyclemania, when surveyed, have noted that recycling has increased sustainably during the eight weeks of the competition.
At the inception of Recyclemania in 2001, only two colleges competed in a single category: total recycling per capita. It started off as a challenge between Ohio University and Miami University. The number of colleges doubled the following year, but there was still only one category. In 2003, the number tripled from what it was in 2001, and the numbers continued to rise.
By 2005, the number of schools that had registered for the competition had grown so much that the organization had to create another category. In 2012, the competition saw nine different categories: Grand Champion, Per Capita Classic, Waste Minimization, Gorilla Prize, Paper, Cardboard, Bottles and Cans, Food Service Organics and Electronics.
“It’s a competition against other schools who have registered to compete in Recyclemania,” said Martin. “Obviously, you know, I don’t think we’ll ever come out on top because ... we’re a very small school compared to like Texas A&M University which has around 20-30,000 students. They consume more, so they have more to recycle. But I think the whole purpose of the competition and taking part in it is to bring in awareness and also to push people a little more during the competition to recycle.”
Different categories aid the colleges with larger populations, like Grand Champion or Gorilla prize. However, some categories, like Per Capita, allow the smaller schools to hold a threat to the larger schools as that category is judged by the amount each student recycles or throws away.
“What we do is, I work with the people who collect and process the recycling here on campus,” said Martin. “Every week they give me the total amount of each type of material that we recycled. Then I have to log that into the Recyclemania website, and I have to do that each week. So I get a total for how many pounds of plastic, how many pounds of aluminum, cardboard, paper—newspaper and magazines — so on and so forth on how much is recycled each week.”
Last year, Longwood took part in the Compost category of Recyclemania, so now the information of all the food that gets composted from the Dining Hall is necessary in the competition.
Recyclemania is sponsored by Alcoa (a company that has a goal to increase the rate of recycling in America to 75 percent by 2015), SCA (a global hygiene and forest Products Company), Coca-Cola, Keep America Beautiful (the leading nonprofit organization) and American Forest and Paper Association (the national trade association of the forest products industry). Organizations that are partnered with Recyclemania are College and University Recycling Coalition (CURC), US EPA WasteWise, Campus Conservation Nationals and the United Negro College Fund.
If any student wants to partake in Recyclemania or wants to help Longwood increase their ranking, all they have to do is help fill up one of the blue cans located anywhere on Campus.
