Talkin’ trash on the new IWMS Web site

Talkin’ trash on the new IWMS Web site

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News Staff

Since the early days of the environmental
movement, the Rice community has been an active participant,
collecting glass, cans and newspapers for recycling. While
through the 1970s and ’80s the efforts waxed and waned
as organizers graduated, by the ’90s students, faculty
and staff were participating by recycling office papers,
toner cartridges and even food waste.

This summer Rice took another step, consolidating
the “green” efforts initiated by the President’s
Office, Facilities and Engineering and Food and Housing
to create Integrated Waste Management Services (IWMS).

Ryan McMullan ’98 was hired as Rice’s
recycling coordinator and given the task of consolidating
disposal services and recycling, as well as adding services
for reducing and reusing waste, thus forming IWMS.

“Instead of disposal being our mainstay,
we want to give equal consideration to reducing, reusing,
recycling,” McMullan said.

And an important tool in educating the
Rice community on this new focus is the recently created
Web site for IWMS. Found at <http://www.rice.edu/recycle>,
this site is a tidy compilation of campus efforts to live
gently on this planet. It features a cornucopia of information,
including:
• green guides that tell how to make Rice offices,
residential colleges and the daily choices of the Rice community
more environmentally friendly;
• an interactive map of campus recycling bins–click
on a building and find the nearest bin for recyclables;
• Rice’s recycling statistics;
• the “Fate of Trash” tour;
• links to a bevy of cool sites aimed at educating
people how to identify and minimize the waste in their lives.

“We have tried to make this site more
substantive [than the previous Web site for the campus recycling
program]. We want to help the community to participate in
the efforts to reduce our environmental impact,” McMullan
said.

And participation is increasing, according
to waste and recycling statistics that McMullan has been
gathering since the fall of 1998. He has seen an increase
in the amount of waste recycled at Rice to 260 tons a year
from 200 tons a year.

Such progress is due to the Rice community’s
increased use of paper recycling as well as the composting
program, through which Rice’s food waste is recycled.
Reduction and reuse programs like the reusable mugs program
through the residential colleges and the Greensheet (department
surplus) also have made a considerable impact.

“The recycling program, combined with
the groundskeepers’ effective use of our yard waste,
has allowed us to get diversion rates (the amount of waste
that is diverted to recycling/reuse rather than landfill)
of about 28 or 29 percent, where most universities have
diversion rates of about 15 percent,” McMullan said.

Another successful effort has been the
junk-mail reduction project that began last April and is
a collaboration between IWMS and the delivery services department.
Designed to reduce the amount of waste that comes on campus
in the first place, the junk-mail project helps members
of the Rice community get their names off mailing lists
they don’t want to be on.

“Many of the scientists get lots of
thick equipment catalogs, and they don’t want them.
Rather than just throw them away, they send them to us and
we get them off the mailing list–and, of course, recycle
the catalog,” McMullan said.

Each of the above programs and projects–and
how to participate in them–are explained in detail
on the IWMS Web site, <http://www.rice.edu/recycle>.