DAN QUAGLIANA
Managing Editor
Over the last few weeks, many students have been concerned about the recycling on campus — or the lack thereof, in their view.
The belief that SUNY Fredonia does not separate its trash and recycling when waste is disposed of is not a new one, but it has been gaining traction around campus recently.
According to Sarah Laurie, the director of environmental health and safety and sustainability on campus, “The concern that the campus is mixing recycling and landfill trash comes up often, almost every semester.”
However, she did confirm that, “Recycling IS separated from landfill trash.”
Laurie explained how “There are separate receptacles around campus and separate dumpsters at each building. Our waste hauler, Casella, collects them separately and sends us annual reports outlining how many tons of material were sent to [the] landfill and how many tons were recycled.”
The university maintains dumpsters at every building on campus. Throughout each day, custodial staff empties the trash and recycling bins throughout their buildings, and they take the waste outside and place it in the appropriate dumpsters.
“…the most common [concern] we’ve found is that students see building custodians loading trash and recycling into the same bin on their custodial carts,” Laurie said. “What the students don’t know or see is that there are two separate bags within that bin and the materials remain separated.”
She also said that the “only time” that trash and recycling would be mixed would be because of “an accidental mix-up.”
But Jordan Stephens, the chair of the Student Association Sustainability Committee, said something different. He claims that, “There’s definitely a recycling issue on campus, but the problem might not be exactly what we thought.”
“The custodial staff is pretty small, so a lot of the issue actually comes from students contaminating the recycling bins,” he said.
Stephens further explained that in his experience, when custodians do sometimes throw away recycling bins, it’s because students have accidentally filled them full of trash instead of recyclable materials. “While custodians do sometimes throw away full bins, it’s usually because they find that a bin labeled for recycling is actually full of trash.”
On campus, some recycling “stations” have three different recycling bins: refundable materials, paper recyclables and “other” recyclable materials.
The university works with Casella to handle all of the “no sort” recycling bins, but if those bins get contaminated by any amount of food or non-recyclable materials, however small, everything in the bin has to be thrown in the trash. The university could face fines if they don’t do this, so custodians don’t really have any choice.
Stephens has “had a really hard time finding any bins on campus that don’t have contamination issues,” he said. “There’s a specific threshold for what can be accepted by Casella, and most of the time we exceed that threshold. That’s why custodians end up throwing a lot of it away. Anything under that threshold gets reported back to us in our waste audit, so it gives us a clearer picture of how much is actually getting recycled versus sent to the landfill.”