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Recycling program to teach good habits

By Aly Van Dyke

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Anyone who has left an afternoon lecture in Budig Hall with a wrapper stuck to the bottom of a shoe or a book bag that has absorbed a Coke stain from the floor can attest to the litter problem in some campus classrooms.

But this semester three departments, the Center for Sustainability; Facilities Operations, Housekeeping; and KU Recycling, have joined forces to run a pilot program called the Campus Litter Reduction Campaign. The program’s goal is to reduce the amount of litter on campus to ease these frustrations as well as save the housekeeping staff some time at night, Celeste Hoins, administrative manager of the Environmental Stewardship Program, said.

“We want to spread awareness that it’s on us to keep these rooms clean during the day,” Celeste Hoins, administrative manager for KU Recycling said. “It’s littering. We shouldn’t do it on the street; why would we want to dirty up our hallways and classrooms?”

Key to the campaign are the groups of three bins located outside almost every classroom in Budig, Wescoe and Snow Halls. One bin is for recycling newspapers, one is for recycling bottles and cans and one is for throwing away trash.

Hoins said the University didn’t purchase any new bins for the campaign, but rather relocated other bins on campus to make recycling and throwing away waste more visible and convenient for students.

Videos advertising the campaign will also run in some of the rooms between classes later this semester, Hoins said.

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Photo by Chance Dibben

Students enter a Budig lecture auditorium Monday afternoon. The Campus Litter Reduction Campaign program from KU Recycle has designated recycling bins in high-traffic halls such as Budig, Wescoe and Snow to reduce on campus waste.

Representatives from the three groups said they hoped the campaign would increase awareness about littering, reduce trash pick-up and instill a sense of pride in students for the University’s campus.

“To keep campus clean, it needs to be a community effort,” Vic Kane, assistant director of Facilities Operations, Housekeeping, said. “The KU campus is beautiful, and litter takes away from that beauty.”

Cleaning a classroom takes 30 to 40 minutes on average and requires between five and 10 minutes of that cleaning time to pick up the trash left behind, he said.

However, Kane said Budig and Wescoe Halls had the most difficult classrooms to clean on campus. He said the housekeeping staff spent 20 to 30 minutes in each room just picking up newspapers and food containers.

With less trash to collect, Kane said, the housekeeping staff could devote more time to disinfecting surfaces to help limit the spread of disease.

Kane said part of the littering problem was the build-up of waste throughout the day because the housekeeping staff could only clean at night, when students weren’t in the buildings.

Christina Graber, Kingman junior, has a class in Budig this semester. She said that she had seen how dirty classrooms could get, especially after lunch time, and that she hoped the efforts to clean up campus would be effective.

“It’s your stuff,” she said. “It shouldn’t be anybody else’s problem. This is everyone’s campus, you just need to do your part and keep everything picked up.”

Of all the trash accumulated on facility floors, Kane said newspapers were by far the most littered item on campus.

“Students read the newspaper everywhere, and leave it everywhere but the recycling bins when they’re done,” Kane said.

Hoins also said she hoped the campaign would help limit that behavior and help people realize that their waste doesn’t just disappear when they leave it on the ground.

“Nobody’s doing it intentionally to make campus dirty,” she said. “But that may be a consequence of all this litter.”

Hoins said she hoped to divert at least one ton of newspaper waste each month from classroom floors. According to the KU Recycling Web site, about 150 tons of newsprint waste were collected during the 2007-2008 school year.

The three groups chose Budig and Wescoe for the pilot because the halls host a number of large lectures taken by freshmen and sophomores, Hoins said.

“We thought we would be able to get freshmen and sophomores to participate as they start school so the habits would stick with them through their four years here at KU,” she said.

The departments chose Snow as a case study to see how successful the program would be with smaller, more advanced classes.

Should the program be a success, Hoins said she hoped to expand the campaign to the entire campus.

— — Edited by Lauren Cunningham

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