MORGAN HALL
LAYOUT ASSISTANT

Starting back in January, brightly colored paper posters and flyers were hung all across campus with the message of recycle this, don’t recycle that, help Cal State San Marcos get it’s seventh RecycleMania Grand Championship. Last week, RecycleMania announced that CSUSM won the competition by recycling a grand total of 79.96 percent of our campus trash in a 10-week period starting in January and ending in April. Not only did we beat our 2010 recycling percentages, but we also won with a 9 percent difference over Antioch University Seattle, which was the largest gap between all of the other colleges.

Claiming the title of Grand Champion meant the CSUSM campus as a whole demonstrated impressive feats in resource reduction and recycling. According to recyclemania.org, our campus started week one with a 63.41 percent weekly recycling rate, but finished week ten with a strong 83.64 percent weekly recycling rate. Over the course of the competition, we recycled an average of 20 pounds of paper, 15 pounds of cardboard, and surprisingly only 13 pounds of bottles and cans per person.

Questions arose regarding whether or not CSUSM may have had a slight advantage over the other colleges that participated. Do we use more paper, so we recycle it more? With there being over 20 vending machines, a cafeteria and a market, do we sell and then recycle more plastic bottles and cans? An unproven rumor has been floating around campus implying the main reason why we win each year is that our campus janitorial staff is specifically trained to separate the recyclable materials out from the trash. According the rules of RecycleMania, “The competition’s goal is to increase student awareness and involvement in campus recycling through collaboration and partnership with participating schools,” and says nothing about the legality of janitorial help within the competition. If the main goal of the competition is get student to participate in recycling and we are having the hard-working janitorial staff do most of the work for us, then what are we the students really learning about recycling?

With the many recycle bins that stand next to each trash can on campus, students are more than capable of recycling by choosing where to toss their waste. Information about what can be recycled is available at csusm. edu/sustainability/recyclables.

Photo and artwork courtesy of Morgan Hall