Campus hits recycling milestone; pushes for more waste reductions

Walter Smithers, university solid waste manager, shows off recycling bins in the Law School atrium. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Edward Hershey

Cornell reached an environmental milestone in 1998 when more than half the waste generated on the Ithaca campus was recycled.

Data tracked by Cornell's solid waste manager, Walter Smithers, show that 48 percent of Cornell's waste was trucked to the Tompkins County landfill site in 1998. The other 52 percent -- 4,435.5 tons -- was diverted to one of a number of recycling companies or sent to the university's huge new compost site on Stephenson Road.

The first full year of the compost operation near the junction of Route 366 and Game Farm Road added significantly to Cornell's effort to recycle, said Smithers, an employee in the grounds department who has coordinated much of Cornell's recycling effort for the past eight years. Most of the waste sent to the compost site emanates from the Vet College, greenhouses and the campus dining halls.

"It's certainly making a difference," Smithers said, "and from the standpoint of maintaining momentum for the university's overall recycling effort, it could not have come at a better time because there are some negative factors mitigating against recycling generally and in some cases reducing our options. The Asian economic crisis has had a major impact because Asia was a big market for recycled products. And competition in the trash-hauling industry has dramatically reduced the price of landfilling. That reduces the economic incentive to recycle."

At Cornell, Smithers added, recycling is more an environmental than an economic issue. In 1991, the first year in which he kept data, Cornell trucked 7,413 tons of putrescible (subject to decomposition and foul odor) trash to the county landfill. Last year that figure was 3,797 tons -- a reduction of just under 50 percent. The amount of recycled goods has increased in almost the same proportion. More than 987 tons of office paper was recycled last year compared with 588 tons in 1991, for example; and 648 tons of corrugated cardboard was recycled in 1998, up from 270 tons seven years before.

Smithers and his assistant, Jeffrey Smith, are always on the lookout for new markets and ways to increase the percentage of campus waste that is recycled.

One sign of the times is Cornell's newest recyclable -- the outdated computer. No computers were recycled in 1991, but last year computers weighing a total of 21.9 tons were recycled through an Elmira-based firm that pays Cornell 3 cents a pound for computing equipment and charges $10 each for monitors.

Working with recycling coordinators and campus custodians, Smithers and Smith spot-check recycling bins to determine if Cornellians are separating their trash in ways that optimize recycling. When they sense a trouble spot, Smithers said, they try to determine what the problem is and address it. By and large, he said, offices and other venues where the same individuals work most of the time do very well. Larger locales with more visitors -- and thus less opportunity to assign responsibility -- are more susceptible to contamination when an item, such as a half-empty food container, is tossed into a labeled bin reserved for recyclables.

The next frontier in the effort to further reduce waste, Smithers said, will focus on the front end -- minimizing production of waste on campus and maximizing use of post-consumer recycled products at Cornell. He said far more office paper is still in use on campus than one might expect in this computer age, a problem that might be diminished when the efficiencies associated with Project 2000 kick in.

The importance of purchasing paper and other recycled materials that are "post-consumer," Smithers said, is that many factories always recycled much of their own waste in the plant as a matter of industrial efficiency. Thus when it became good public relations to be the purveyor of recycled goods, they capitalized on this longstanding practice and included this in-house recycling in their own labeling. In most cases, only materials that have been reclaimed after consumer use -- such as newspapers collected at the curb rather than those that never leave the pressroom of a news plant -- truly reflect an effort to reduce waste through recycling.

Questions? For more information about recycling at Cornell, call 254-1666, e-mail recycle@cornell.edu or log on to http://www.fm.cornell.edu/recycling/.