As students seem to struggle with recycling in the residence halls of SUNY Oswego, the Office of Sustainability and student employees are taking action to create a change.

Each residence hall on campus has a recycling room, which is open to students throughout the week to come and drop off recyclables, 5-cent returnables and trash. The recycling rooms on campus are run by recycling technicians (RTs), a part of student operations staff (SOS). The only exception to this is The Village, where students have access to a recycling specific dumpster to drop off their own recyclables.

“At the sustainability office, we are trying to figure out a way to increase the recycling initiative on campus, but it is not an easy task because it partially depends on individual responsibility and commitment to recycling,” Paige Bogart, the recycling technician coordinator, stated in an email. “However, there are definitely underlying institutional factors that need to be addressed as well.”

One new initiative, the mobile recycling service, brings recycling to students instead of them having to go to the recycling room. This involves RTs going around their designated buildings to knock on student doors and collect their recycling on a weekly basis, Bogart said.

“I hope that that program will really make it more visible, because I know it’s so easy to just not want to have to approach the recycling room,” said Jon Mills, the campus sustainability coordinator.

Paige added that this new service was inspired when cardboard boxes were frequently found in garbage cans around campus. 

“Last semester there were about 30,000 packages delivered to campus,” Bogart said. “However, according to the RTs, they did not see that amount of cardboard making their way into the recycling room.”

“I don’t want to assume, but everybody should understand that cardboard is recyclable, so that not making it into the recycling rooms and the RTs not seeing that waste reaching the rooms is a really interesting observation,” Mills added.

Evan Youngs, a recycling technician in the Waterbury and Scales complex, has some concerns about mobile recycling but is still excited to try it.

“Personally I am a bit wary about it, because especially on a Sunday, I feel like people will be irritated if I’m gonna be knocking on their door asking for recycling and rolling this big, loud, gray bin full of trash through the halls,” Youngs said. They also expressed concern that because their building does mobile recycling on a Sunday, some residents may not be there.

“But that’s not me saying that it’s a totally bad idea, because once again we haven’t tried it out yet. So I think I’m going to volunteer to do it first, because I want to see what it’s like,” they said.

Recycling room hours vary depending on the building. When a student enters the recycling room, they can speak with their RT who will guide them on how to properly divide the waste that they bring in. There are three different bins, and recycling goes into one bin. Since it is single-stream recycling, all recyclables can be put in the same bin, Youngs said. Garbage goes into standard bins, and there are also returnable bins. For any cans and bottles returned, ResLife puts the funds back into the residence halls, Youngs said.

Mills described that proper recycling is important because if one contaminated or non-recyclable item ends up in a canister of recyclables, the entire lot becomes contaminated.

“I think we’re still facing issues where not all of the students understand that this is a resource to support them making sustainable change on campus,” Mills said. “We’re still seeing the large majority of students are not using the recycling rooms. Why is that? How can we make it a lot easier and visible and visual for everybody?”

Sustainability also collaborates with ResLife through the OzThrift program. Mills described the way that donations are collected, through large gray bins which are set up in the residence halls. Students can put their gently-used items in the bins as they prepare to move out of their residence halls for breaks. The office then goes through these donations and prepares them for sale at the beginning of each semester. Mills described OzThrift as a huge diversion of waste, as it prevents all of these items from being placed in the trash.

“OzThrift is great because all of the students advertise it themselves,” Mills said. He added that a lot of advertising happens through Instagram story shares and by word of mouth. “So I think that gets incredible promotion, and if we could really do that on the recycling side of things, oh my god, we’d be in such a great place.”

A survey called the Examination of US University Sustainability and Recovery Activities done by Resource Recycling Systems (RRS) examined college campuses and their recycling programs. The survey examined “approximately 11% or 312 universities and colleges within the U.S” in order to establish statistics on the current state of recycling. The report found several crucial statistics, stating that “63% of schools sampled have an established recycling program on campus, with an average recycling rate of 24%.” Additionally, the average diversion rate, “which includes recycling and composting activities,” was 45%.

SUNY Oswego’s sustainability program is admired for its composting, for which it recently won the 2022 College Recycling Leadership Award from the New York State Association of Reduction, Reuse and Recycling (NYSAR3), according to a an article found on oswego.edu. The RRS survey found that 33% of schools surveyed had a composting program.

Posters are also being distributed around campus to allow students to stay up to date on what is or is not recyclable, as this is constantly changing, Mills said. These posters come from the Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Authority, where Oswego’s recycling is sent.

Recycling is currently mandated in SUNY Oswego Residence Halls. 

“We really want to encourage students to be doing reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order,” Mills said. “But we constantly get hung up in the third one, and that’s where we start, is recycling. But really, the main drive is reducing what you’re consuming. That, in itself, is really going to drive our diversion rate up and is really going to make an impact on campus.”

To recycle your items, check the hours of your hall’s recycling room or mobile recycling and visit during these hours to learn how to dispose of your waste.