Recycling on Campus

UNL actually is a pretty good campus as far as recycling is concerned. When I started as a freshman, I don't remember recycling containers being as ubiquitous as trash cans. Maybe my memory is fuzzy or maybe there just weren't as many. Anywho, I see recycling containers just about everywhere there are trash cans now. In buildings, outside, here there and everywhere there are recycling containers. This is the first one I see on my daily jaunt to class:

The most common recycling bins at UNL appear to be plastic, cans and newspapers. The usual suspects. If I know there is a recycling station coming up, sometimes I'll go out of my way to reach it. Sometimes I don't. I need to work on that.

In a slightly related note, but not really, The Academic Grind offers $.70 coffee if you are refilling. The same price goes for using a tumbler. That's a pretty cheap cup of coffee nowadays. Compare your 16-20 oz tumbler refill for $.70 to a 12 oz tall coffee at Starbucks for $1.50.

That reminds me this semester of when free coffee was offered outside the union for anyone with a reusable container. That was an awesome day. Free coffee and saving the environment? Check.

I'm rambling again. Back to UNL's recycling opportunities. In 2009, the entire UNL campus collected 2984.42 tons of recyclables. Nice! Here are some quick figures from the UNL Recycling Website:

In 2009 UNL recycled 44.3% of its waste, up from 9.3% from 2008.

National average of waste that campuses recycle per year - 26%.

So far UNL has saved:

• 3,543..... Cubic yards of Landfill Space
• 18,251..... Trees
• 64,417..... Eliminated pounds of Air Pollution
• 4,401,801..... KW Hours of Electricity
• 7,515,270..... Gallons of Water

"UNL - Recycling." University of Nebraska - Lincoln. n.d. Web. 8 December 2010.