BU’s Recycling Not As Organized As Other Colleges

For nearly two years, Robyn Kenney had been struggling to get Boston University to recycle more. But Kenney, who led the Environmental Student Organization’s recycling campaign last semester before graduating in December, said she was frustrated with how slowly she felt BU was moving to improve its recycling programs.

“The University is very passive,” Kenney said. “We’ve had to be the catalyst for change.”

“We want to see a systemized recycling program that’s cost-effective, easy and efficient,” said Pam Flattich, administrative manager of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety, which supports students interested in recycling. “We’re still building the foundation. It’s a process.”

BU added 100 new recycling bins to the South Campus residences last year. The ESO recently used its petition, and together with CAS Forum, got approval from the CAS administration for new bins for paper, newspaper, plastic and aluminum recycling in the CAS building by the entrances and in the basement. The College of Communication and School of Law buildings will also soon be receiving new bins for paper, according to Flattich.

Nevertheless, Kenney said she encountered resistance when dealing with the University. Up until her graduation, she was still trying to find out from BU exactly how much it recycles and how much it spends on trash disposal and recycling.

“No one has done a rigorous study of how recycling has changed over time or how it relates to the total waste produced,” said Peter Schneider, director of the Office of Environmental Health and Safety. Instead, he said he has been preoccupied with other matters, such as dormitory fire safety.

Getting new bins into CAS was a small victory for the CAS Forum, but the group decided not to go after its ultimate goal of putting bins in the classrooms because it didn’t think it was achievable. “It’s better to get a small victory than lose a larger battle,” said Kyle Wackenheim, president of CAS Forum.

BU’s recycling program is mainly student- and volunteer-driven. A year-and-a-half ago, BU hired two work-study students as recycling coordinators. Mira Stanchak, a junior who works 8-10 hours a week promoting recycling, set up a website (www.bu.edu/recycling) last summer to inform students what can be recycled and where.

Part of Stanchak’s job is to meet once a month with a group of volunteer student recycling coordinators. They live in the residences and monitor and maintain the residences’ central recycling bins. They empty the bins and bag the paper, glass and cans every week in preparation for pickup by Capital Paper, BU’s contracted recycling company. BU’s custodial staff does not handle the recycling in the residence and some of the academic buildings, according to Justin Dunn, a senior RA in Warren Towers. Recycling bins are not officially allowed on the individual residence floors because they pose a fire hazard, so students must carry their recyclables to the central bins, located in the basement or main floors of the buildings.

Some of the smaller residences, such as the brownstones on Bay State Road, don’t have their own bins, forcing students to take their recyclables to another residence building a few blocks down the road every week, according to CAS junior Kathy Haines.

Events to promote recycling in the residences, such as paper drives at the end of the semester and recycling competitions between residence buildings, also rely on student initiative to make them happen, so they’re not guaranteed events every year.

Similar student-run programs have failed at other campuses. Tufts University, which recycles about 30 percent of its trash, called in its custodial staff to take over recycling five years ago. The students weren’t always emptying the bins in the residences, leaving paper to pile up, said Patrick Jacobs, who until December voluntarily coordinated Tufts’ recycling program on top of his regular job as a computer systems and planning manager. The local fire department even had to warn the university of the fire hazard.

“I don’t see how it’s possible for students, with all their commitments, to haul out the university’s trash,” Jacobs said.

BU’s recycling program contrasts those of other area universities such as Harvard University, said Schneider, who along with Kenney and other BU staff overseeing recycling visited Harvard last semester to check out its recycling program.

Harvard recycles about 19 percent of its trash — 31 percent of compost and other miscellaneous recyclables included, according to Rob Gogan, who oversees trash disposal and recycling on about 70 percent of the Harvard campus.

While BU doesn’t keep or disclose recycling statistics, Harvard displays its statistics publicly on its website.

“Harvard and Tufts are proactive,” Schneider said. “They’re doing good things … so they’re happy to share their numbers.”

“Until our bins are overflowing on a weekly basis, I don’t think the University will see huge incentives for an enormous extension of the program,” said Chuck McCormick, director of the South Campus Office of Residence Life.

“Our role is to be responsive,” said Jim Keating, head of the Physical Plant. “If students agree that there should be another box, then we would work to build it.”

So far, he added, he has not heard of many complaints from students in residences about having to dispose of their own recycling.

Although the custodial staff has agreed to collect the recycling once a week from the new bins coming to CAS, Wackenheim suspects the unionized custodial staff would resist taking on the added responsibility of emptying a large number of recycling bins.

Tufts encountered this resistance when it tried five years ago to get its custodians to collect the recycling instead of students. Convincing custodians to take on the extra workload was a “painful” process, said Jacobs, who was Tufts’ recycling coordinator at that time. When Tufts contracted out its custodial staff five years ago, it wrote the recycling duties into the contract.

Lack of awareness and a unified voice among students is also part of the problem. Stanchak said she has had trouble getting people educated and interested in recycling. A teach-in that she and her fellow student recycling coordinator organized last spring drew only four students, even when they provided free food.

Wackenheim said he also worries about lack of student interest in recycling.

“There is concern that the new bins won’t be used,” he said.

The key people in the Office of Residence Life, the Physical Plant and the Office of Environmental Health and Safety, along with the two work-study students, all serve on a recycling committee, but they didn’t meet as a group last year and haven’t yet this year, Flattich said.

They each deal with recycling only as a part of their regular jobs and have been meeting in smaller groups. There is no single person devoted to just recycling on campus.

“I would love to drop everything I’m doing and do recycling full-time,” Flattich said.

To get students interested in recycling, BU needs to hold monthly recycling events, but, “I don’t think the recycling program has the manpower to do that,” Stanchak said.

Cost is also a major hurdle, especially now with the University’s shrinking budget. “The University policy given to the physical plant is ‘We don’t want to spend a lot of money just for the sake of calling it recycling,'” Keating said. He declined to comment on how much BU spends on recycling and trash disposal.

Harvard spends about $350,000 on recycling and $1.5 million on trash disposal each year. If Harvard did not recycle, it would pay about the same amount to dispose of the additional volume as trash, according to Gogan.

Moving slowly with a well thought-out recycling program is the best way to make sure BU ends up with a smoothly running program, Flattich said. Kenney wishes the University would be more proactive and move more quickly, but she felt torn by the need to foster a cooperative relationship with the University. “We can’t burn any bridges,” Kenney said. “But at the same time, if we’re too nice, then nothing’s going to happen.”