The 2013 RecycleMania competition is underway, and Lewis and Clark Community College is up to the challenge.
Over an eight-week period that started Feb. 3, all the trash and recyclables on campus are being
weighed and reported at http://recyclemaniacs.org, where the college is competing in the
Benchmark Division against Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Principia College and a
number of schools across the nation to have the highest recycling percentage.
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Scores are posted each Friday for the previous week at Recyclemaniacs.org, and tracking will
continue through April 5. Final results will be announced April 12.
"Recycling is sometimes an overlooked and underappreciated aspect of sustainability, and yet in
many ways it is one of the most important,” said Nate Keener, L&C Director of Sustainability.
“In seeking to remake the world in a way that allows us to maintain production/consumption
cycles for at least seven generations, we often forget that fully half of the
production/consumption cycle involves figuring out what we're going to do with the waste and
byproducts we generate. Recycling enables us to complete a circle whereby our consumption
feeds right back into our production.”
“RecycleMania is a competition that focuses our attention on the benefits of recycling. We can
reduce the amount of resources needed to make the stuff we use every day; we can reduce what
we send to landfills; we spend less money doing both,” he said.
RecycleMania began in January 2001 as a challenge between Ohio University and Miami
University, as a way to motivate students to recycle more. In 2004, RecycleMania partnered
with the U.S. EPA WasteWise program, and the competition steadily grew to 630 educational
institutions representing 49 states and 4 Canadian provinces in 2011. That year, more than 7.5
million students and staff participated, collectively recycling 91 million pounds of recyclables
and organic materials.
“This activity helped to prevent the release of 127,553 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent
(MTCO2E), equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 25,000 passenger cars, or the
electricity use of more than 15,500 homes,” according to the official RecycleMania website.
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