YSU charts course toward recycling honor

YSU Recycling is handing out rewards to people caught recycling.

By HAROLD GWIN

VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — Youngstown State University finished 18th out of 77 colleges and universities involved in the grand champion phase of the collegiate RecycleMania competition last year.

Dan Kuzma, manager of YSU’s recycling and reuse program, thinks the university can do better this year in the 10-week event designed to boost recycling efforts across the country. He believes YSU has a shot at placing first in the state and the nation.

The grand champion is the school that, based on overall results, demonstrates the greatest achievement in both source reduction and recycling.

The 2008 version of RecycleMania began in late January and has 400 colleges and universities involved at various categories of competition.

Schools compete in different contests to see which institution can collect the largest amount of recyclables, the least amount of trash and have the highest recycling rate. The university that recycles the most wins.

“We’re doing pretty good,” Kuzma said last week.

YSU was the No. 1 Ohio school in the grand champion category in the early stages of the this year’s contest and is running 23rd out of 72 schools nationally, maintaining a 31.5 percent recycling rate, he said.

Some of the other schools competing are Ohio State University, Ohio University, Miami University, Bowling Green, Harvard, Yale, Duke and Boston College. The competition runs through April 6.

People on campus are gradually becoming aware of RecycleMania, Kuzma said, adding that more has to be done to enlist student participating, perhaps through a mini-competition among residence halls in March to see which hall can do the most recycling.

This month, YSU Recycling is catching students, faculty and staff “green-handed” in the process of recycling. They might just be dropping a plastic bottle into a recycling container when a member of the recycling team spots them and gives them a reward on the spot.

The rewards are various prizes from Youngstown Litter Control and Recycling and are made out of recycled products, Kuzma said.

“People don’t expect it. They’re just going about their daily business and are surprised when handed a prize,” he said. “We want to spread the awareness of recycling in hopes they will do more and pass it along to friends and family.”

There are recycling bins all over campus, and YSU maintains a recycling center on Adams Street in the Smoky Hollow area that accepts paper and publications, plastic containers, metal food and beverage cans, glass beverage bottles and cardboard.

Kuzma said 35 percent of campus waste is food, and YSU launched a food composting program at Christman Dining Commons two years ago using material from the dinner meal to create compost to be used in campus landscaping.

That program is going well and is reducing the amount of food waste at Christman, Kuzma said, adding that it has been expanded to include waste from all of that dining hall’s meals.

YSU’s goal for 2006 was to divert 430 tons of recyclable, reusable and compostable material from the landfill, and the goal was met, Kuzma said. The university also set a goal of 35 percent overall recycling rate that year and met it as well, he said.

RecycleMania began in Ohio in 2001 with just two schools competing for bragging rights — Miami University in Oxford and Ohio University in Athens. The prize remains the same, but the number of participating schools has grown dramatically.

gwin@vindy.com