Recycling center leads by example

Author: Hannah Wilson

Take a moment and look into your personal recycling bin. What do you see - some empty cans? A few pieces of paper? That moldy orange you meant to eat last week?

Soon your can will fill up, but what happens then? Will you do the socially responsible thing and sort everything into centralized containers, or do you, like most Middlebury students, think, 'This is mostly recyclable' and dump everything into one of the College's many recycling bins without the slightest afterthought as to what happens next?

When your recycling leaves your room, the next stop is not a magical transformation into new plastic bottles and printer paper, bur rather a time-consuming process. Your bags of co-mingled recycling are picked up and placed outside of the buildings by the custodial staff and then transported to the recycling center, located near Ridgeline parkingl lot, via truck.

"In the ideal world - Alice in Wonderland - every community member would take their waste and place the glass into the mixed containers, paper into the green paper one, and other assorted trashing into the trash bin," said Missy Beckwith, waste management supervisor for the Center.

The five permanent staff members at the Center and various student workers then sort through all of the recycling bags using a gloved hand and place the materials into balers based on eight different categories, including four different types of paper and four different types of plastic. Once the materials are sorted they are then placed into balers and packaged for sale to a distributer in Rutland. The goal of the Center is to divert 60 percent of College waste from landfills.

"We're different [from other colleges] because we are doing the baling work here," said Beckwith. "Rather than having a baler come to us, then ship it to their warehouse, we take some of the steps out by sorting on campus and then shipping to the baler."

They turn in all those five cent aluminum cans and 10 cent glass bottles, as well. In fact, recycling saves the College $110 per ton of by not sending it to the landfill.

"It saves us from having to throw all the recycling away and it helps out the environment by adding to the ultimate goal of carbon neutrality by 2016," said John Gosselin, team leader at the Center.

The weight of the College's waste is also reduced by composting most pre- and post-consumer (i.e., dining hall) food.

"Some departments, including the Robert A. Jones house and the Environmental colloquium, showed enough interest in composting to coordinate with us to compost the leftover luncheon food," said Beckwith.

However, helping to save the environment and conserve College funds is not always easy. Over the years students have become increasingly more removed from the recycling program on campus, which was initially proposed by Professor of Environmental Studies Stephen Trombulak's senior seminar in 1988.

"The students who put the original plan together were taking a class with me," wrote Trombulak in an e-mail. "But they were energized and actively engaged in the project. It would be more accurate to call it a student-faculty collaboration under the umbrella of a senior capstone course for the Environmental Studies major."

Students then worked as consultants, analyzing the possibility of a program at Middlebury.

"Once we completed the research, we presented our results to then-Treasurer [David] Ginevan, highlighting the payback time periods under different scenarios for the increase in disposal costs," wrote Trombulak. "Ginevan was impressed enough by the analyses as well as the philosophical arguments about the college's environmental responsibility to 'do the right thing' that he authorized the creation of the recycling program."

Initially the program was operated mostly by students setting up bins around campus and collecting the recycling using a single truck and sorting in an old coal storage room near the service building. Now, there are around 20 students who work flexible hours alongside the permanent staff at the completely independent Center.

Alyssa Krone '12 is one of them. "Working here makes me feel like I am being useful instead of just having an on campus job," said Krone. "It is really beneficial to the campus as it is trying to be ecologically sustainable and responsible."

Unforunately, student interest and awareness has declined on campus since the Center became institutionalized.

"There are two things that I recommend students do - the first is to visit the Recycling Center within your first year at Middlebury to see how it works. It is a shame when seniors stop by and say, 'I never knew this was here.' And secondly, to hold each other accountable. Peer pressure is the only way to gain any ground," urged Beckwith.

A round trip to the Center takes around 45 minutes, or less if you live in the Mods. Located next to the wind turbine, which produces on average 25 percent of the energy required to power the Center, it was built out of recycled concrete from the old science building to look like an antique Vermont barn. The ceiling height may appear daunting; however, it was constructed in order to allow the truck to raise its back door high enough to dump all of the recycling into the Center. Even just peering inside the doors of the the Center is an eye-opening experience. The imposing space is used to hold balers and bins full of co-mingled, "dirty" (improperly sorted) recycling. It is not a pretty sight.

"We're being environmentally responsible, but are we being socially responsible by letting a few people do everyone's work?" asked Beckwith.

Not only do you see firsthand how much trash is produced by the College, but visiting the Center is also a good opportunity to visit the reuse trailers.

"The reuse trailer works in two ways," said Beckwith. "For us it is a way for things that can't be recycled to be saved from the trash, and for students and the community it is an easy way to leave things they can't take with them at the end of the school year," said Beckwith.

When the trailers open up, about two weeks after clean out ends, community members line up outside of the Center to claim anything and everything students leave behind. These items have ranged from an organ, to everyday clothes, to assorted coffeemakers and even the occasional microwave. At the beginning of the school year, two trailers are open (from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) - one for soft goods, like clothing, shoes and bedding, and one for household items and school supplies. After two weeks, all of the unclaimed clothes and soft goods are donated to charity and the Center only maintains one trailer.