The Tufts community recently completed its participation in a 10-week inter-collegiate recycling competition known as "Recyclemania."
The competition, which ended last Friday, April 9, consisted of two parts: measuring the amount of recycling completed by the entire college campus community, and measuring the recycled material found only in the dorms and dining halls.
A little less than 50 schools participated nationwide. At Tufts, the competition was run as part of a work-study program. Eight student interns, under University Recycling Coordinator Dawn Quirk, were in charge of weighing the amount of recycled material on campus during the 10-week period. Senior intern Caitlin Beatty said that personnel in the dining halls and dorms also helped with the weighing process.
"We weighed the paper and cardboard, and figured out what the average weight is per box," Beatty said. "After the first few weeks, we just used average weights."
Recyclemania started five years ago, but this was the first year that Tufts competed. Quirk said she decided to bring Recyclemania to campus to get people excited about recycling.
"Recycling has been around the campus since 1990," Quirk said. "We want to revitalize student excitement about it at Tufts through competition."
Quirk also said that upperclassmen generally recycle more than first and second year students.
"I hope [the competition] captures the attention of the new students [who might not be as acclimated to recycling as upperclassmen]," she said.
Some of Quirk's interns are freshmen, however. Freshman Lauren Shields, who participated in Recyclemania, is currently monitoring areas of recycling at Tufts in preparation for EarthFest at the end of April.
"I worked on promoting the event by making flyers and by [encouraging] dining services to increase their recycling rate," she said.
Miami University in Ohio won the competition for the second year in a row, by accumulating a little over 66 pounds of recycled material per student. Tufts wound up in 9th place with 40.45 pounds of material recycled per student.
"The first week we ranked somewhere in the middle, but we got better as the weeks went by," Beatty said.
Quirk also said she was very satisfied with the University's results. "We did fantastic," Quirk said. "I'm thrilled."
"We capitalized on the competitiveness of Tufts students to support recycling," Shields said.
Beatty said she thinks that this competition can help improve the recycling scene at Tufts in the future.
"I think people tend to make recycling out to be too serious a thing," she said. "We want this program to get people to think, 'Hey let's just recycle because it's fun.' We're hoping to create good habits."
The next project for the interns is to get students to recycle old paperwork before they move out for the summer, as well as preparing for next year's Recyclemania competition.
"We are talking about focusing more on waste reduction next year, rather than recycling," Quirk said.
