Engaging in winter sports helps some students to enjoy themselves despite the freezing temperatures and roads covered with snow. But for those students who would rather indulge their competitive spirit from the warmth of their dorms, Recycle Mania may be a more appealing winter competition.
Recycle Mania is a competition between recycling programs at different universities throughout the US. It began in 2001 when students Ed Newman and Stacy Edmonds Wheeler (of Ohio University and Miami University, respectively) wanted to expand the recycling programs at their schools. The main goal of the event is to increase student awareness of campus recycling.
For 10 weeks, schools compete to see which university recycles the most waste. Ratings are based on the number of pounds recycled per student at each school. This year, prizes will also be awarded to schools that recycle the highest percentage of their overall waste.
Harvard University, MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts are among the 49 universities participating in the competition this year. This will be the first year that Tufts competes.
The contest should help Tufts Recycles in its ongoing mission to popularize recycling and educate students about the value of waste reduction and reuse, according to Recycling Coordinator Dawn Quirk.
"Tufts Recycles will also be looking to contact other agencies for cooperation," Quirk said. "We hope to collaborate with ECO [Environmental Consciousness Outreach]."
To help advertise for Recycle Mania, Carmichael and Dewick will set up scoreboards showing the progress of participating schools from week to week.
One of the main goals of Tufts Recycles is to make recycling easily accessible to students. Achieving this, Quirk said, is heavily reliant upon the work and dedication of the OneSource workers who are responsible for sorting and transporting items after they enter the bins.
"The competition is also an opportunity for OneSource to get some great press on all of the hard work they do for recycling," Quirk said.
The 2004 Recycle Mania Victor was Miami University, where 58.28 pounds were recycled per person during the duration of the competition. Last year, Tufts recycled at least 45 percent of its trash, including compost, yard waste, and scrap metal.
Tufts' recycling rates have increased since 1990, when the school received a grant to implement a project called Tufts CLEAN (Cooperation, Learning, and Environmental Awareness Now).
Headed by Sarah Hammond Creighton, the project manager for Tufts Institute of the Environment (TIE), and her associates, a heightened recycling effort began at Tufts. Creighton worked closely with dining halls and other Tufts organizations to improve recycling and energy efficiency on campus.
Records from past competitions indicate that dining halls are a major source of waste at most universities. At Tufts, however, dining halls are accountable for a large percentage of waste reduction: dining facilities on campus compost leftover food items and recycle bottles, cans, and cardboard.
Last fall, TIE hired Quirk as full-time recycling coordinator. Up until that point, the position had been part-time only. Quirk hopes that the added time and labor invested in the program this year should help Tufts to approach recycling with a higher level of intensity.
"Although recycling can externally be improved in many ways, internally the focus will continue to be reducing contamination and increasing participation, while reducing solid waste overall," Quirk said.
Although Quirk encourages recycling in place of merely tossing items in the trash, she emphasizes the importance of reducing overall waste.
"Reducing solid waste overall is the most important piece, which can be overlooked by an eagerness to recycle," Quirk said. "Unfortunately, Recycle Mania does not stress the importance of overall waste reduction."
Nonetheless, Quirk hopes that participation in Recycle Mania will help further the goals of Tufts Recycles by invigorating the spirit of recycling at Tufts.
"Hopefully the contest will renew the hype which surrounded recycling when the program first started and more people will participate," Quirk said.
