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School Recycling Horrors!

*****
Rating: 3.15
Total Votes: 48

The results of trying to get 1000 high school students to sort and recycle their trash.

Recycling Horrors

Written March 25, 2005

This is an account of what I experienced in operating the recycling program while in high school. Since then, I have found the situation to be universal, as it occurs at a business where I managed the recycling, and I have observed it in public containers as well. It also appears that college/university students are even worse than their high school counterparts in their ability to sort waste into the proper containers.

Along with many other students, I help out the school along with the environment by collecting recyclable materials from the bins which have been strategically placed throughout the building. We collect paper, aluminum, and polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles on a weekly basis.

The collection is always interesting, because you never know what you will find in the recycling bins. Most bins are clearly labeled (CANS ONLY, PLASTIC ONLY, WHITE PAPER ONLY) with a few exceptions where there are mixed cans/bottles. Despite the labeling, people continue to throw trash in the bins. Even when it is easier to throw trash in the adjacent trash can, then still crumple the milk carton and jam it into the hole on top of the recycle bins! Recycling bins at my school are also used as spittoons, repositories for worn out clothing, and a place to dump pizza boxes and party cups after a celebration.

Wednesday March 23rd, 2005
Recyclables Collection.
Task: Collect plastic bottles from downstairs bins.
What we find:
  • One Milk Carton, half-full, chocolate. The milk had solidified.
  • One Pair of nylon wind breaker pants, ripped down the crotch.
  • Two Broken Glass Bottles
  • One Full, nearly untouched bottle of WATER
  • Pizza Crusts, multiple.
  • One Sandwich, type unrecognizable
  • Dunkin Donuts Coffee Cup, about one-quarter of the way full.

Other things I have seen in the bins:

  • Condoms
  • Cafeteria Forks/Spoons (reusable stainless steel, not plastic)
  • The resultant solid waste of a party (most likely by a sports team, since the trash was all in the bin down by the locker rooms)
  • They always say that no alcoholic beverages are allowed in school. Does that include the beer that is created at the bottom of the recycling bins from the fermentaion of soft drinks?

What I Have Seen People Do:

  • Use the Recycling Bins as a Spittoon. Once someone spit a big wad of chewing tobacco into the recycle bin in the environmental science teacher's room!
  • Shove a milk carton into a recycling bin labeled "CANS ONLY" on the top, front, and wall behind it. The bin also had a lid with a ROUND hole. One would think the intelligence level would be high enough to think "Hey, it says Cans Only, and the hole is round. The milk carton is square. Maybe it does not go in here!" It reminded me of those toys for small children where they have to shove shapes through the proper holes!
  • Use the Recycling Bins as Trash Cans. (Yeah, this is a given)
  • Say "I'm not an environmentalist" when told by a classmate to put their bottle in the recycling bin instead of the trash can.

Sometimes I wonder...

If people shove milk cartons or anything like that into a container which says "Cans Only" in three different places and has a can-sized hole in the top, then moron is one of many terms that could be used to describe them. By throwing their garbage into the recycling containers they impede the otherwise efficient process of collection.

In our lifetime, regulations will be passed which will require you to sort your waste into recyclable and non-recyclable portions. Right now recycling is optional in most states, but in the future it will be mandatory. Failing to recycle your waste properly will result in a penalty, and by not recycling properly, the costs associated with it and the resources which are recovered from it will go up.

We've figured out that sending everything to a landfill or incinerator is no longer sustainable, and that doing so would put huge burdens on our natural resource supplies. Learn what #1, #2, aluminum, steel, corrugated, etc. means today...because from here on out you will be sorting YOUR OWN trash!

A Linear system doesn't work on a Finite Planet. How much $135/barrel crude oil does it take to re-make and transport all of the stuff you throw away? How much entropy is created in that process?

 

Last Modified: 05/25/2008
Created On: 04/29/2005