New recycling bins hope to combat confusion

By Lilly Kujawski
Editor

Outdoor “Bigbelly” recycling bins on campus have recently been replaced to help improve and make easier the recycling efforts on campus.

The new recycling bins were placed on campus a few weeks ago, according to Rebecca Andrews, recycling operations manager at WCC.

Andrews said she conducted a survey of the Bigbelly bins last year and found that there wasn’t very much paper material in the outdoor bins.

“The outdoor bins have always been an issue; because they’re outdoors, people don’t have the ability to wash anything, they weren’t labeled very well,” Andrews said. “They weren’t drawing people’s attention as to what goes in what bin.”

She said the only paper products she found were usually fast food bags containing food remnants, which was causing contamination to other materials. This prompted recycling staff to switch to a bin for cans and bottles only, as an attempt to collect cleaner recycled content.

“If people have note paper, if they’re in the park working or something like that, there’s lots of paper stations inside the buildings for that type of paper,” Andrews added. “Any paper that’s had food on it—like a food tray or a Subway wrapper that’s had mayo all over it, paper towels, tissues and napkins—none of that can be recycled, anyway.”

Similar recycling bins already exist inside of the buildings on campus and have proven to be more effective, according to Andrews. Recycle Across America, a non-profit advocacy group, reports that one of the biggest reasons items don’t get recycled is due to confusion about what can be recycled, often because of inconsistent or unclear labeling.

“We have definitely seen improvement in the indoor recycling,” Andrews said. “Now we have the clearly labeled bins, less bottles are going into the trash because it’s far easier to see where the bottles need to go, whereas before it was a little more confusing and the bins were smaller and harder to find.”

Andrews said that 50 percent of the total wasted produced on campus is recycled—this is higher than the national average, which in 2018, the EPA reported to be about 35 percent.

Many students try to recycle single-use coffee cups, which is a common recycling error, Andrews said.

“My biggest challenge right now is trying to educate people that a paper cup can’t be recycled; neither can styrofoam cups,” Andrews said. “They’ll put it in the recycling bin because they’re trying their hardest to recycle as much as possible, so I understand the choice.”

Andrews added that there’s an issue of non-recyclables and dirty items being placed in recycling bins.

“If you put a half cup of coffee in the recycling bin instead of the trash, that coffee’s going to spill out all over the recycling and the recycle staff are going to be picking through that, trying to save what they can,” Andrews said. “If you contaminate the whole bin, everything gets thrown out.”

Even if students were to rinse out these coffee cups, such single-use drink cups are still not recyclable.

“It’s not the students’ fault or the users’ fault,” she said. “The problem is the manufacturers put the recycle symbol on them, because they say technically they can be recycled.”

Andrews said that, however, local recycling facilities do not accept these single-use cups.

“WCC is really good on their recycling; we pretty much do everything you can do in this area,” Andrews said. She added that some companies offer “mail-back” recycling programs for these recyclable items that aren’t accepted locally.

All of the recycling collected on campus is sorted by hand on-site, which helps the campus ensure items will end up being recycled when sent out to a recycling facility, she said.

“We’ve always sorted it on-site, so we really control the product that goes out very well. We pick out anything that’s dirty,” Andrews said. “So we can… provide materials that we know will be recycled. We have a very low rejection rate on our materials because we sort it in advance.”

After the recycling is collected from around campus, it’s sorted by recycling staff. Office paper and cardboard items are bailed and sent to a vendor in Romulus. Non-returnable plastic bottles are taken to the Recycle Ann Arbor drop-off station. Plastic bottles that do have a 10 cent deposit are redeemed through a collaboration with WCC chapter of Phi Theta Kappa honor society where the proceeds are used to support the WCC food pantry.

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