Tufts Daily

Issue date: 11/15/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Annie Wermiel/Tufts Daily Senior Josh Yellin participates in the trash sort.

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.

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