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Redude, Reuse, RecycleMania Results Are In

By Caroline Ryan
Staff Writer

LIU Post participated in RecycleMania from Feb. 1 to March 28. “Nearly, 4.5 million students from 394 schools recycled and composted 80.1 million pounds,” according to the RecycleMania website.

Photo by Janisha Sanford
Photo by Janisha Sanford

The goals for RecycleMania were to “motivate students and staff to increase recycling efforts and reduce waste generation, generate attention and support for campus recycling programs, encourage colleges to measure and benchmark recycling activity in their effort to improve their programs over time, and have a fair and friendly competition” according to the RecycleMania website.

LIU Post also competed in the RecycleMania 3R challenge, where students and faculty on campus took pictures while recycling. Submissions included different hashtags such as reduce or recycle, and could be tweeted to the RecycleMania group page, or sent to the organization via text.

For eight weeks, the schools participating were ranked by RecycleMania depending on the amount of recyclables they collected. The program was also divided depending on the size of the school. Last year, LIU Post finished the overall challenge in 192nd place out of 256 schools, recycling 47,580 pounds of materials.

This year, LIU Post was ranked in the medium division for the RecycleMaina 3R challenge, and came in sixth out of a total of about forty schools. LIU Post collected 67 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, which is enough energy consumption to power six households or 13 cars. Overall, this year Post came in 229th out of 232 schools, and collected 40,140 pounds of recyclable materials. The University of Albany won first place in the medium division; they collected 150 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, which measured to be the consumption of 13 households, or 29 cars.

The LIU Post Sustainability Committee, which consists of faculty, students and administrators, helped run the RecycleMania event by being in charge of the bottle-shaped recycling bins around campus. William Achnitz, the Campus Life Coordinator for Riggs Hall, applied for and won the recycling bottle bins through a contest that Dasani was holding in 2013.

Although the event is over for this year, recycling will continue to occur as the recycling bins are present in academic buildings all year round, to promote continued recycling efforts. This is the fourth year LIU Post has competed in the RecylceMania competition, and it recycled more this year than in previous years. The Sustainability Committee did tabling events in Hillwood Commons, and promoted the event via social media. The goal of the event was to get the entire student body to become aware of their recycling habits.

“It made people think about what they were doing with their used bottles and cans and paper before they threw it out. I think if a handful of people chose to recycle instead of throw something out, then we made a difference,” said senior English major Melissa Colleary.

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