By Anna Geannopoulos
“Magazine paper is too shiny to be recycled, right?” my roommate last year asked me after I set up a little cardboard box in our Dyson room.
This, and many other questions came up while she tried to actively recycle things and accept my fruitless attempt to reduce waste. At the time there were two different colored bins that were vaguely marked with the three-arrowed symbol around the dorm complex.
I assumed one was for paper and the other for everything else; most people just used them for trash. For the record, you can recycle magazine paper, and also for the record, I once walked by the maintenance staff throwing an old air conditioning unit into one of the dorm recycling bins.
SCAD prides itself on being on the cutting edge of innovation, yet it took them almost a year after the city of Savannah started using single-stream recycling to implement the use of it in their residence hall complexes. Inconvenience is the main reason why people opt out of recycling. Living in a place where you know everyone else is using the recycling bin for throwing out trash is disheartening. Even after my current residence, Barnard Village, got the mysterious blue recycling bins at the end of last quarter, there was no information given on what should go in them.
For people to use the bins you must tell them what they are for. Different people view recycling with varying levels of concern and knowledge. Some people genuinely don’t care, but for the most part people who abuse the recycling bins just don’t know what they are supposed to do. The idea of sorting trash automatically turns people off from recycling but really all you need to do is put some items in one receptacle and others in the bin right next to it. If you do this as you go, there is no need to sort through it later.
The single stream bin makes this even easier – your paper, cardboard, plastics, glass, aluminum and metal cans can have one big party together as they wait to go to a plant which will sort them, melt them down and create new items. If a list of things that can go in were listed on the lid of the can I’m sure more people would use the service.
People shouldn’t feel that they have to recycle, they should adamantly want to.
SCAD, of all places, should take conserving the environment very seriously. Courses in sustainability should be a requirement for every area of design, not just an elective. They should be giving out free reusable shopping bags at orientation, not satchels that most people will never use. The blue bin doesn’t reduce waste; motivating people to use it does.
