RecycleMania's Method Is Flawed, Misguided

Dan Cunningham

Issue date: 2/7/08

Jan. 27 marked the start of a growing movement called RecycleMania. RecycleMania is a 10 week competition between schools intended to increase recycling participation and, in the end, help reduce the environmental footprint that humans will leave on Earth. Does recycling actually help the environment? Not necessarily, but at least people feel good doing it! Assuming that recycling actually nets a positive benefit to the environment, is starting a competition to recycle the best way to promote eco-friendly activity?

Competition creates outcomes that are beneficial with respect to the rules. In the global economy, competition is a measure of how well a company did within the scope of the market. In "Guitar Hero," competition is measured by how many notes you hit compared to the length of the song. In RecycleMania, it is pounds recycled per student. This simple measurement runs a great risk of undermining the efforts of the environmentalists who designed it.

There are a few ways to increase the pounds recycled per student. One, and most preferable, is to convince people who do not recycle to participate. This would, in theory, reduce the total garbage on campus and increase the amount of tons recycled. If that happened, it would be a successful campaign. But, the other way to increase pounds recycled per student, is to have already "environmentally conscious" students purchase more recyclable materials and dispose of them properly. This extreme, but very likely, scenario is not accounted for in any of the measuring tools that the program recommends.

If students buy more bottles or cans just so they can recycle them in a competition, they are undermining the purpose of recycling. The goal of recycling is to reduce garbage, not to feel better when you buy large, garbage-producing products. RecycleMania completely neglects measuring the total garbage volume when judging the success of any UConn's recycling program. Total garbage volume fails to come up on any of its spreadsheets, making any measurement of recycled tons completely arbitrary. In the end, there will have been no evidence showing a reduction in garbage because it is not being tracked.

Although the RecycleMania program does have the option to compete with total waste reduction being measured, UConn is not participating in that aspect of the contest, according to the Recyclemania Web site.

A good environmental competition would take into account other factors that could undermine the results. RecycleMania has failed to do that. Its measurement of pounds recycled per student is not measured within the scope of total garbage and that leaves open the possibility of increased wasteful behavior. In fact, the process of promoting recycling rather than discouraging the purchase of waste-producing goods is counterproductive to the goals of environmentalism.

It is inherently hypocritical to compete on who can produce - but recycle - waste when the ultimate goal is to eliminate it. Every time an individual buys a soda bottle or picks up a newspaper, they are asking for more to be produced. This means that the process of using precious raw materials is supported every time someone decides to indulge. Recycling the bottles will allow for more to be made out of them, but it does not prevent future losses in resources. Rather, buying the bottles in the first place perpetuates the unnecessary usage of raw materials on indulgences.

Perhaps this concept is too innovative to push, but here it is. Instead of buying bottles or cans of soda, you use a reusable bottle and buy fountain drinks. Not buying the aluminum cans could save a miner's life one day, and not buying the disposable bottles will help keep oil prices low. Also, stop buying bottled water - nothing is more pathetic than paying a 10000% markup for what can be pulled from a tap for free. If you have to buy bottled soda, purchase two liter bottles rather than the 20 oz. ones. These may be radical suggestions, but they might actually help the environment. If you are concerned about paper waste, read the news online. It saves The Daily Campus money and could save trees!

As the saying goes, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Any environmental program worth joining should have that slogan guide their behavior. Society should not give up on the idea that people cannot reduce their overall wastefulness. Further, recycling should not be treated as a solution. It is, on its own, a messy manufacturing process that creates pollution. Recycled materials are transported, melted down or otherwise processed, and need to be formed into new, usable materials. The only 'saving' of the environment is the effort to extract a raw material which, by no means, is the worst pollution. Show you care by wasting less, not competing to waste more.

Staff columnist Dan Cunningham is an 8th-semester economics major. He can be reached at Daniel.Cunningham@UConn.edu.

RecycleMania Has A Positive Impact

Dan Cunningham's column, "RecycleMania's Method Is Flawed, Misguided" (Feb. 7) is, well, misguided. Cunningham is wrong to suggest that recycling is not an environmentally beneficial practice and that RecycleMania is counterproductive. His commentary does have one valid point: that waste reduction is better than recycling. Reduce and reuse come before recycle in the famous slogan for a reason. Reducing consumption and reducing our waste is absolutely better than recycling, but recycling is far better than land filling or incinerating and making products from virgin materials.

Recycling is absolutely an environmentally beneficial practice as it reduces solid waste and reduces green house gas emissions. Compared to producing products from virgin materials, recycling saves enormous amounts of energy and prevents pollution and land degradation associated with mining and drilling. For example, it takes about 95 percent less energy to recycle an aluminum can than it does to make one from virgin material. For other materials, the energy savings are about 70 percent for plastics, 60 percent for steel, 40 percent for paper and 30 percent for glass. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 2006, 82 million tons of material was recycled preventing about 50 million metric tons of carbon emissions, roughly the amount emitted annually by 39 million cars, saving the energy equivalent to 10 billion gallons of gasoline.

RecycleMania is not about promoting consumption, but about raising awareness and changing student, staff and faculty habits. Though UConn is not participating in RecycleMania's waste reduction division this year (it can't since UConn does not currently track all total solid waste tonnage) waste reduction is still being encouraged, as it has for years through use of reusable EcoHusky mugs and double-sided copies. Other efforts to reduce waste are popping up on campus. The UConn Co-op just started selling reusable bags and is setting up a donation program for customers that don't take plastic bags. There are even some people on campus that would like to see UConn kick the bottled water habit.

As UConn's recycling program continues to improve and students continue to demand a more environmentally responsible campus, I hope that next year UConn will be in a position to track our waste reduction and be able to compete in that part of RecycleMania. In the mean time RecycleMania will only help UConn reduce its environmental impact as it forces us to closely monitor our recycling efforts and encourages the UConn community to develop the recycling habit.

I spent this morning picking up recyclables around campus with the Willimantic Waste recycling truck, and was appalled by the amount of unread newspapers we found. If Cunningham wants to get serious about reducing waste on campus, he should focus his efforts on encouraging the paper he writes in to stop printing thousands of papers that don't get read. Let's get serious about recycling and waste reduction rather than spreading bad information.

RecycleMania is on, and you're in the game. Go Huskies!

-Dan Britton

Sustainability Coordinator
Office of Environmental Policy