The new battle for the bayou: RecycleMania
Rice, Houston universities compete in recycling

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Forget football’s “Bayou Bucket.” Rice and the University of Houston will now be competing for the “bayou bin” during this year’s RecycleMania, a nationwide intercollegiate recycling contest to see which institution can reduce, reuse or recycle the most campus waste. Though there’s no trophy or recycling bin to tout, Rice is competing among a number of Houston schools for the pride of being the campus with the most recycling.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Last year, students strung plastic bottles from a tree near the Rice School of Architecture to encourage students to go green, especially during RecycleMania.

More than 500 schools from across the country and more than 20 from Texas are participating in the competition, which launched Jan. 17 and runs through March 27. Rice was the first Texas school to sign on to the intercollegiate program five years ago.

“In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a big increase in the number of competitors from Texas,” said Richard Johnson, director of sustainability at Rice. “I’m delighted to see that so many other Texas schools have made recycling and other environmentally friendly measures a priority on their campuses. Although, it is going to make it a bit tougher for us to be the state champ.”

Over a 10-week period, schools report recycling and trash data. The data are then ranked according to who collects the largest amount of recyclables per capita and the largest amount of total recyclables and who has the least amount of trash per capita or the highest recycling rate. Johnson said that Rice tends to do well in the “per capita” competitions but can fall behind in “total volume” competitions because the campus has significantly fewer people than large state schools.

“Some of the contests are based on the weight of the amount of goods we recycle,” Johnson said. “That makes it tough when you have about 5,000 students going up against 55,000 students.”

Johnson said that Rice really shines in this competition; in past competitions Rice has placed in the top 10 to 20 percent in per-capita paper recycling. Rice generates about 4 million pounds of municipal solid waste and recycles about 25 percent of that, which means about 1 million pounds of trash is diverted from landfills. In the first week of RecycleMania, Rice’s recyclables weighed in at 19,845 pounds, while its solid waste was 60,220 pounds. That’s a recycling rate of 24.79 percent.

“While that is pretty good, we’d like to get that percentage up even higher,” Johnson said. “It costs about 2 cents for every pound of trash we throw away, whereas recycling is cost-neutral.”

He said Rice outperforms many other universities in recycling aspects not measured by the competition, like recycling approximately 85 percent of construction waste on major construction projects and almost all of the campus landscaping waste.

In addition to the recycling going on during the competition, Rice has measures in place to encourage the sustainable-living culture at Rice. Each residential college has an eco rep who tailors green efforts to their particular college. They host study breaks and organize campus events to raise recycling awareness. Last year, they strung plastic bottles from a tree near the Rice School of Architecture to encourage students to go green, especially during RecycleMania.

“Rice is a leader among other schools,” said Josh Rutenberg, a Lovett College sophomore leading RecycleMania efforts on campus. “We can’t just ‘show up’ for the competition. We really have to participate and try to win it.”

To help encourage students, faculty and staff to participate, Rutenberg and fellow RecycleMania student leader Rebecca Sagastegui partnered with staff from Facilities, Engineering and Planning to create a Rice Recyclemania Facebook Group. On that page they will post Rice’s weekly standings and competition news. The page will also allow other community members to post photos and videos of themselves recycling or encouraging others to recycle.

“We hope it creates more awareness about the competition and about all the other recycling efforts on campus,” said Sagastegui, a Sid Richardson College senior.

Rutenberg and Sagastegui will team up with FE&P to host a table with more RecycleMania information and some recycling bins from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Feb. 1 in front of Kelley Lounge in the Rice Memorial Center.

For more information about recycling at Rice, visit http://recycle.rice.edu. To request a deskside recycling bin for paper recycling, ask your custodian or call Rice’s recycling coordinator at 713-348-5272.

Learn more about RecycleMania at http://www.recyclemaniacs.org.