RecycleManiacs, unite!

You may hate Yale. You may despise Amherst. But until now, there hasn’t been any way to get them where it really hurts. Behold – RecycleMania is here to (safely) satisfy your vindictive inter-collegiate grudges!

RecycleMania is a competition between 93 colleges and universities nationwide to see who can collect the most recyclable items per person (it began as a contest between Ohio University and Miami University in 2001). It runs for a full ten weeks until April 28th, at which point eternal glory is ours, should we emerge victorious – the contest was written up in both The New York Times and The Boston Globe last year.

Every week, the volume of recyclables across campus gets recorded and sent off, with each type of recyclable item (cardboard, bottles & cans, etc.) individually tabulated. Without even knowing it, Wesleyan is already in fifth place for cardboard recycling – imagine what we can do when we really put our minds to it! Make some Yalies cry, that’s what.

You, the skeptical student, may be wondering if recycling is high enough on the scale of socially responsible behavior to be really worth bothering with. While recycling won’t eliminate landfills or deforestation overnight, it’s a key element in understanding how your choices as a consumer affect the physical environment around you. Think about where that newspaper goes next time you throw one away, and where it could have gone. Our landscape is saturated with an increasingly lethal array of human waste, from chemical runoff to raw sewage. Like it or not, recycling is a gateway drug to building a healthy environmental consciousness. And in a country that produced 236 million tons of solid waste in 2003 (so says the EPA), that kind of awareness is sorely needed.

The folks here at EON (Environmental Organizers Network) will keep you posted on the competition’s progress; but it’s up to you to do the footwork! Check out www.recyclemaniacs.com for more info, and if you’re not sure where to ditch your recyclables on campus, log on to www.wesleyan.edu/recycling. That warm, cuddly feeling you get every time you recycle a cardboard box just got a whole lot warmer and cuddlier!