Students walking by the Res Quad yesterday afternoon were greeted by a peculiar sight: Garbage from a large, brown dumpster was strewn out on the lawn and volunteers in white jumpsuits sorted through the waste.
The "trash sort" was sponsored by Tufts Recycles! the recycling program of the Tufts Facilities office and aimed to raise awareness about waste management on campus and investigate what types of goods Tufts students do and do not recycle.
During the trash sort, a group of volunteers, mainly comprised of Tufts Recycles! interns and a few staff members, demonstrated that many of the items that students throw in the garbage could actually be recycled.
Volunteers leafed through the garbage on the quad and divided it into recyclable and non-recyclable categories. Recyclables were then sorted into such categories as cardboard, food and beverage boxes, student publications and electronics.
These Jumbos were a day early in their celebration of America Recycles Day, a nationally recognized day dedicated to promoting recycling around the country.
"The goal [of the trash sort] is ... to figure out the amount of trash that could've been recycled [and] to raise awareness about recycling," said Tufts' Recycling Coordinator Dawn Quirk, who led the sort and runs recycling initiatives on the Boston and Medford campuses.
Volunteers sorted about six cubic yards of waste from the dumpster serving Metcalf Hall. Quirk said that that sample was representative of the Tufts Medford/Somerville campus' waste as a whole.
Organizers found that the most common recyclable materials that students had thrown away were paper products, especially cardboard. Still, the majority of waste that volunteers went through turned out to be non-recyclable trash.
According to Quirk, a surprising insight from the trash sort was that students also tended to trash a large amount of food, much of it edible, and food-related products such as plastic shopping bags.
Additionally, she said that she believes students do not know enough about the specifics of what they can recycle. For example, some may be unaware that staples, paper clips and plastic bindings do not need to be removed when recycling paper, she said.
Although sophomore Emily Rockwell had not had any experience with Tufts Recycles! in the past, she decided to volunteer at yesterday's event after seeing an announcement on TuftsLife.com.
"Who wouldn't want to go digging through trash for a good cause?" she joked.
Rockwell said that the event showed her that recycling at Tufts is still not at the level she believes it should be. "It's obvious a lot of students don't separate their recycling at all," she said.
Josh Yellin, a senior and a Tufts Recycles! intern who volunteered at the event, echoed Rockwell and Quirk's assessments.
"I think that recycling ... is such an easy thing for people to do," he said. "[But] people aren't actually doing it."
Many students walking past the trash sort took notice of it, but volunteers noted that few asked more about the group's efforts.
In the coming days, organizers hope to use the results of the trash sort to gain insights about the way Tufts students recycle, and about how to decrease the amount of recyclable material that Jumbos throw away.
"We want to have a campaign come out of it - for example, maybe [about recycling] paper," Quirk said.
Tufts Recycles! is also planning a number of awareness campaigns for next semester, and members will participate in RecycleMania, a nationwide collegiate recycling competition, for 10 weeks in the spring.
RecycleMania last year pitted 201 colleges from across the country against each other in such categories as paper recycling and per capita recycling.
Tufts participated in last year's competition, placing fifteenth in the country for its cumulative recycling rate. The university did poorly in waste minimization, though, finishing 59 out of 66 schools in that category.
