Students encourage community to recycle
Litter collected from campus decorated the sidewalk near the Taggart Student Center Patio Monday in an attempt to create student awareness of reusing and recycling on America Recycles Day.
The recyclable trash was made into a pig statue and several members of Utah State University Recycling and the Environmental Coalition of Students (ECOS) sported pig noses made from egg cartons.
USU students are very wasteful, said Jay Price, ECOS president and recycling education coordinator.
“The pig noses represent our way of living,” he said.
According to the USU Web site, the university produces about 2,000 tons of trash each year. Only about 24 percent of that waste is recycled, Price said.
Laura Sherry, a freshman studying conservation restoration ecology, said she thinks USU students are wasteful because the majority of them are brought up in Utah where there are not good recycling programs.
“I hope people can realize that recycling is a lot easier than it sounds and the results are so much greater than it sounds,” she said.
Also on display outside the TSC were giant bales of recycled products from the USU Recycling Center. Students could guess the weight of each bale and win a T-shirt from the Recycling Coalition of Utah. The heaviest bales were the cardboard and white paper bales, weighing about 1,097 pounds each, Price said.
A pledge to reuse and recycle was available for students to sign. The pledge also challenged students to reduce waste at USU by reading the Statesman online. Price said he will use the petition to try to reduce the number of newspaper copies produced.
Sunrise Cyclery demonstrated possible ways to reuse products with bicycle wheel hangers and a 10-pound medicine ball made of old bicycle tubes.
Although Logan is one of the best areas for recycling in Utah, numbers can still improve, Price said.
“I think a lot of USU students are not educated about recycling. There is not a lot of promotion,” Joni Funk, a sophomore majoring in environmental studies, said. “You have to make a conscious thought to put something in the recycling bin instead of the trash,” she said.
Than Bork, a junior in exercise science, said he is from Oregon where recycling is mandatory. He said he thinks it’s stupid that Utah does not have similar laws.
“Here, you have to go out of your way to recycle,” he said.
USU Recycling has a goal to reach 33 percent in 10 years, he said. USU Recycling accepts glass, plastic, tin, batteries, cardboard, paper, scrap metal and tires. Last year, 268,640 pounds of mixed paper were recycled through the university.
Price said USU could improve in its composting program. Composting involves reusing food, waste and yard clippings as fertilizer for trees, he said. BYU is a good model, he said.
Cache Valley has about 20 recycling drops and a program where the city picks up recycled material at people’s homes, Price said. According to the Curbside Recycling Collection pamphlet, the fee is $6 a month and recyclables are picked up every other week in a blue container supplied by the city.
The USU Recycling Center is located at 879 E. 1250 North, next to the USU Parking Office. The center is open 24 hours a day and the materials may also be dropped off in Aggie Village.
-ashschiller@cc.usu.edu