University of Idaho’s campus-wide recycling program had been suspended in 2020, shortly after the beginning of the pandemic. While the decision went into effect over a year ago, many students remain unaware it happened. Those living on campus are who have been impacted the most.
Residence Hall Association Director of Regional Involvement Claire Westby finds the lack of recycling can be impractical and inaccessible.
“There would be people who want to recycle things, but aren’t able to,” Westby said. “It’s a fairly common complaint.”
Westby recounted a holiday where trash was not picked up the following Monday. Trash was overflowing out of dumpsters and onto the street. She believes the amount of waste has likely increased without recycling to take some the garbage away.
“The fact that I’m not getting certain amenities that are expected in places to live, it doesn’t feel great,” Westby said. “It’s a decision that mostly affects students, a lot of the faculty that have made these decisions did not consult students.”
The decision was made in April of 2020 when students had left campus due to the pandemic. With classes online and students leaving Moscow, student leaders were not largely consulted in the decision to remove the program.
“It was announced in the end of an email,” Westby said. “It seems like a common thread in a lot of university communications.”
The Sustainability Center’s Recycling and Event Coordinator Clara Abplanalp has been working to address issues the university saw with the recycling program before it was suspended.
A large issue was the lack of proper separation and cleaning of materials being put into recycling.
“In 2018, our contamination rates were between 80 and 90%,” Abplanalp said. “When we take that stuff to Moscow recycling, they can’t accept it because contamination rates are way too high.”
According to Abplanalp, removing the program had been under consideration by the university for a while. With such a small portion of trash actually being recycled, the program’s benefit was lacking.
While the recycling program has been gone for over a year, some bins on campus are still marked as recycling despite going straight to the landfill.
Abplanalp said the Sustainability Center has been planning to remove these labels as they are misleading.
Talks with the administration to bring recycling back are going on behind the scenes, but the center is first focusing on helping students learn about recycling.
“Our biggest thing is education. If we get our recycling program back but the campus culture doesn’t know how to recycle, that’s not going to work,” Abplanalp said. “Sometimes it’s a really tricky process.”
Abplanalp hopes to get students confident and comfortable with recycling through education campaigns the center is working on.
“We want to prove to the school students really care about this,” Abplanalp said.
A common mistake people tend to make is recycling an item “just in case.”
“The problem with that is when one thing contaminates a lot of actual recyclable stuff … we don’t have the people or resources to sort all that stuff out,” Abplanalp said. “It’s just not effective.”
An example she gave is in the case of a broken glass bottle in a mixed recycling bin. While it may be a single non-recyclable glass bottle, broken shards scattered throughout the waste makes it difficult or impossible to sort, contaminating the whole bin.
“Unfortunately, a lot of things that say ‘recyclable’ are not recyclable,” Abplanalp said.
ASUI Director of Sustainability Olivia Niemi said a large goal of ASUI this year is to bring recycling back to campus.
According to Niemi, when the university was considering budget cuts that spring, recycling was one of the first things to go. This was a conversation ASUI was not a part of.
Coming in as a freshman last year after the program was removed, she said it felt weird for her to not be able to recycle.
“Having to throw that away when I know it can be recycled is hard,” Niemi said.
If students are motivated, they can take their recycling to the local Moscow Recycling themselves. Even so, transportation can be an issue for those living on campus.
A survey has been sent around for students to fill out, evaluating the importance of recycling to them and their knowledge of it.
Early results include 327 responses, though the survey is ongoing until Oct. 29.
So far, 84% of students view recycling on campus as very important. Only 36% of students knew recycling had been fully suspended.
“Having the bins there, but not being in use, plus not really having straightforward communication when it did get suspended, I definitely think leads people to not realize (the program is gone),” Niemi said.
This misconception has had people requesting to better the program when recycling isn’t even available.
“A lot of people who think it’s here think it’s just been cut down,” Niemi said. “People want to expand, but we’re not even doing it”
Mary Engels is a UI professor at the College of Natural Resources who does research in plastics and microplastics in the environment.
Microplastics are pieces of plastic that are smaller than 5 millimeters. They can be produced at this size, such as glitter, or larger plastics can break down to microplastics.
This secondary source of microplastics often comes from mismanaged waste. According to Engels, about 2% of the waste stream in the United States is mismanaged.
“Whether this is blown off of landfills that are not contained, falls off of garbage trucks or littering,” Engels said. “All of those different things result in plastic getting into the environment.”
When animals ingest plastics it can cause internal damage, exposure to dangerous chemicals or falsely make an animal think they are full. With their small size, microplastics are easily ingestible.
“It comes down to your waste management,” Engels said. “If you think about the whole waste stream being everything that we get rid of, what recycling does is it takes some of that waste stream and allows you to use it (again); a limited life cycle.”
Materials can only be recycled so many times before they end up back in the waste stream. Recycling doesn’t avoid trash, but it reduces the demand for new products.
“It’s a fallacy to think we can recycle our way out of a plastic problem,” Engels said.
Instead, it is more about the demand cycle. Rather than reusing materials, plastics need to be produced less often to begin with. Engels believes there is a pressure to solve the problems plastic poses at an individual level despite the issue being so much larger.
“The reality is, if you go to the grocery store and walk down the aisles, there is not much choice for you to not interact with plastic,” Engels said. “While it’s nice to say, ‘Oh, I just won’t buy plastic,’ that’s not actually a very realistic possibility.”
Instead, she put an emphasis on following influential policy. Reducing market demand would better help the cause.
“I think you have to have people put pressure on industries, companies and government, who are in positions that actually make fundamental change in how plastics are handled,” Engels said.
She believed the greatest loss without a UI recycling program is the lack of training people will receive knowledge on what waste is made up of. With the direction recycling markets have been moving nationally, Engels was not surprised by the program’s removal.
“That, to me, is sort of the biggest tragedy,” Engels said. “We have worked since the 70s to train people how to recycle things.”
Engels believes that without a recycling program, people will get out of the habit of considering “the fate of their waste.”
Information on recycling from the Sustainability Center can be found on their ‘Where Can I Recycle’ page and their ‘Go Recycle!’ video.
Haadiya Tariq can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @haadiyatariq