Sustainability has become an increasing concern on college campuses and around the country in the last few years. Bradley is no different.
Recycling is commonly the first thing that comes to mind when people think about sustainability.
“For the most part, [recycling] is the easiest because it is the most accessible to people,” sustainability committee member Erin McKune said. “Almost everyone has recycling, either at their homes or home town. Most people respond most positively to recycling when they think about being sustainable because I think in a lot of ways, it’s the easiest way for people to feel like they’re at least doing something environmentally positive, even if they don’t ideologically consider environmentalism important.”
However, the sustainability committee members agreed there are some areas that need improvement, primarily in student knowledge and awareness about recycling and sustainability.
“It doesn’t seem like it’s very visible everywhere on campus, which is part of the problem,” McKune, a junior resource management and French double major, said. “I think the university is trying, and there is definitely recycling available. It just needs to be, in my opinion, more apparent to people where recycling receptacles are and what they can and can’t recycle.”
Sustainability member Sarah Handler added that another aspect to this issue is some students aren’t making the effort to even try recycling.
An area where students need to work on recycling is in the library. University support staff member Sharon Obery said the library recycling runs into problems when students don’t know how to properly recycle.
According to Obery, the library is often pulling trash out of their street-side cardboard bin and reorganizing non-recyclable materials out.
“I know it’s a little bit of a pain, but with just a little bit of training, you can learn what you can recycle,” Obery said.
Sustainability committee member Maddie McCaffrey also said education is an issue that needs to be tackled.
“I know that one of the biggest struggles we have with putting more recycling on campus is educating students because if you do put one wrong thing in the recycling, the whole batch is ruined, so it’s really important that people know what you can recycle and what you can’t,” McCaffrey said. “I think that’s a pretty easy initiative to start and once people kind of get used to it, I think it would be really easy for students to do.”
Handler disagreed with recycling taking primary focus.
“The hard thing is that recycling is the thing students think of most when they think of sustainability,” she said. “Often, they think, ‘Oh, I should recycle,’ but recycling really is the last thing you should be doing. It goes reduce, then reuse, then recycle.”
Handler said students should be trying to reduce recyclables by decreasing their usage and taking advantage of reusable containers as well as recycling.
“However, we also keep in mind that we don’t want [recycling] to just continuously grow,” sustainability coordinator Kim Green added. “At some point we want to cap that recycling the idea that we are capturing as much recyclable as we can. However, we don’t want that to continually increase along with trash values.”
Handler said the committee is also working with possibly getting discounts for reusing materials, and it’s trying to work with Aramark to reuse cups. She said she thinks incentivizing recycling will encourage students to make a real effort.
“Bradley is definitely not at the place that other campuses are, but we’ve been moving very aggressively in the past few years since [Green’s] position has been changed to the sustainability coordinator,” Handler said. “We’ve really had a lot of movement towards that and there has been considerable change since I got here as a freshman. I think it’s just harder because some school have been doing this for 20 years and we’re just now starting to do some of these things.”
According to Green, the recycling currently on campus is used to be most effective environmentally and cost-wise.
An area in which cost effectiveness comes into play on campus is in dining services.
Last semester, dining services began a wastefulness awareness program for the dining halls.
“The ‘waste’ tree was designed to create customer awareness, and the results for spring term showed a decline of on average 300 pounds by the end of the semester,” Hanson said.
According to Hanson, this was a successful program. The library also cut out Styrofoam cups and introduced reusable mugs in their midnight munchies program last year, and there are several initiatives on campus to create a more sustainable environment.
McKune said being part of an actual university committee instead of being only a student group helps achieve initiatives.
“People seem interested and concerned, so the more available we can make [recycling and sustainability] to people the more it will be made of use,” McKune said. “It just seems like everyone wants to be able to recycle, they’re just trying to find better ways to do it, so that’s where we’re trying to move forward in it.”
Handler said the committee tries to make it known that recycling can be achieved in small steps with students’ assistance. There are more students than expected interested in recycling and sustainability, according to McKune.
“Student involvement is key to the success of any program on campus,” director of Dining Services Gayle Hanson said. “They are a driving force with various passions for change, and that momentum is vital, not only [to] building the foundation, but for long term success.”
Students can learn more about sustainability efforts on campus at the Dining Services table in the student center today from 11 a.m. to noon.
