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In an effort to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills and cut costs, the University of Maine is planning to adopt a campus-wide, single-stream recycling program by the start of the fall 2011 semester.
The program is the result of a year-long trial run that began after spring break last year in the Hilltop Commons and Marketplace, according to Darryl Ann Girardin, recycling manager of UMaine’s Green Campus Initiative.
“It’s super successful for everyone who goes on it,” Girardin said of the single-stream program, adding that the limited trial run this past year has increased recycling on campus by “at least a couple of percentage points.”
The new program will allow individuals to place all recyclables into one container instead of separating items based on material, a process Girardin referred to as “zero sort.”
By simplifying the process in this manner, it is hoped those on campus will be more inclined to place waste in recycling containers instead of trash cans headed to the landfill.
“By putting a recycling container anywhere, you’ll be able to recycle everything [at that location], which is one of the main advantages to single-stream,” said former Green Team President and fourth-year accounting student Gregory Edwards.
Another advantage of the single-stream program is the ability to accept all types of plastics labeled with the triangular, three-arrow recycling symbol.
Girardin described the new plan as accepting “anything that is plastic that you can bend,” including things like children’s toys and milk containers that carry no redemption value.
Edwards said only No. 2 plastics are currently accepted in collection bins around campus, which severely limits the amount students can recycle. He described the new process as a “vastly superior recycling system.”
In contrast to the expected rise in plastic reclaimed from the garbage, Edwards said he does not expect to see a noticeable increase in paper recycling, as he feels this is an area in which the current program excels.
“I don’t think we will see a substantial increase in paper,” he said. “I think paper recycling is one of the things we do really well now.”
Under the new program, Vermont-based Casella Waste Management will collect recyclables on campus and ship them to a sorting facility in Massachusetts at a price of $55 per ton of material, according to Edwards.
When the push for a single-stream policy was first being discussed in front of the General Student Senate in February 2010, Depot student employee Dane Bolding raised the issue of recycling for more carbon emissions as a result of shipping waste out of state.
“This proposition is going to send most of our money out of state. They’re basically taking [the recycling] from here and shipping it to Massachusetts instead of Millinocket,” Bolding was quoted saying in reference to the policy regarding paper waste in a Feb. 4, 2010 article in The Maine Campus. “It’s called ‘Green Campus Initiative,’ but think of the gas to ship tons and tons of waste.”
While Edwards admitted “it’s not really economical” to ship recyclables to the Massachusetts sorting facility by themselves, he said Casella’s other activities throughout Maine make the program mutually advantageous.
Instead of hiring trucks to specifically haul recyclable materials, Edwards said the waste from UMaine will simply be packed into empty space on Casella trucks carrying garbage to other facilities south of here, essentially using currently wasted space.
“Trucks would already be running down there, anyway,” he said.
Girardin also sees more benefit in the switch to single-stream despite the need for long-distance transport because of the additional waste that will be saved from the landfill.
“The benefits of single-stream I think outweigh having to truck it further,” she said. “I think it will provide balance.”
The only other single-stream sorting facility in the area is run by nonprofit organization Ecomaine, which operates a recycling plant in Southern Maine; however, Edwards said the machinery there is not as advanced as Casella’s and does not accept as broad a range of items.
Single-stream recycling has caught the attention of several other local municipalities, including the town of Orono. Rob Yerxa, director of Orono’s public works department, said the town is currently running the numbers through a cost-benefit analysis to see if a switch to single-stream would be a fiscally sound investment, possibly with the inclusion of surrounding municipalities.
“Part of our assessment is to look at all of our neighboring communities to see if there’s any economy-of-scale benefits,” he said.
At the moment, Yerxa said the town falls below the 50 percent state goal for municipalities, a problem he hopes single-stream could help mitigate. Currently, Orono earns somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000-$15,000 annually from the sale of recyclable materials, a figure that could change depending on several factors, including the adoption of a single-stream system.
“The market for recycled materials is very volatile,” Yerxa said.
Moving forward with the program at UMaine, Girardin said the biggest challenge will be educating the campus population about the new rules, especially concerning contamination. Even though items that once held food will now be acceptable to recycle, she said students would need to clean any waste from containers before discarding them.
“We need to control the amount of food waste that goes into the recycling stream,” she said. “Ideally, you could rinse everything that you put into recycling,” but “essentially, scraping will be necessary.”
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