One of the trickiest parts of running recycling or sustainability on a college or university campus is education. Implementing recycling education at an institution whose very mission is education runs into a lot of potential pitfalls and conflicts.
What did you do today to help get some runners on base and some points on the board?
In my decades in the recycling field, I have seen a lot of facilities, seen a lot of recycling plans, and had a lot of conversations about recycling programs. Yet one that will always stick with me was on a tour of a recycling processing facility in which there was an operations manager who said very proudly, “our number one goal is to make sure our people get home safe at the end of the day.”
Beyond personal interests and motivations though, there is a series of “business decisions” that drive all of the decision-making at any institution or business. Understanding these drivers is often the key to getting the support that you need for your program.
We focus a lot on making recycling easy. We try to make it easy for waste generators to recycle. We try to make it easy to understand. We try to make recycling bins easy to find. Hopefully we focus on trying to make it easy for staff to collect. Yet somehow, too often, we forget to make recycling easy to support. Making your program easy to support is critical to getting the administrative support that you need to sustain the program.
As I noted in my last couple of posts, recycling rates do have value as a benchmarking tool. So how did we get to a point where folks are decrying recycling rates and calling for their end? This is really a case of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions.
In my last post, I talked about some of the pros and cons of both the “% discards recycled” metric and the “per-capita recycling metric”. One of the biggest problems with recycling rates, and one of the reasons that has led to people to call for their demise has been their misuse.
I’m talking about the different metrics that we use to measure and contextualize our recycling data.
“What’s your recycling rate?” That term has been so misused and misunderstood over the years that my long-time colleague Jerry Powell of Resource Recycling Magazine called for the death of recycling rates in a recent editorial.
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