When it comes to recycling, Mark Roytman, 21, has better things to do. Roytman represents the battle that Stony Brook University, New York, is fighting against the reduction of its environmental footprint on campus.
“I never recycle, not at all”, said Roytman, a biology student at Stony Brook. “Part of it is because I’m too lazy and also because I don’t see a reason to do it.”
Across the nation, universities such as Stony Brook are trying to trim down the amount of waste that they produce each year. In its efforts to reduce solid waste output, Stony Brook faces an uphill challenge due to the large student population, student apathy, a large infrastructure and surrounding community resistance.
Since 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has conducted 51 inspections of college and universities in New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. These actions have resulted in $2,700,000 in penalties for violations uncovered during these inspections. Consequently, the universities’ role is a key element in the sustainable development of the environment and essential to lessen global warming.
Stony Brook began its recycling program in 1987. It was started in response to the Solid Waste Management Act of 1988 issued to reduce the amount of garbage produced by Long Island. Beginning with a program that was primarily focused on collecting paper and cardboard, Stony Brook has continued to evolve and expanded collection of recyclable materials to also include bottles and cans, wood debris, yard waste, scrap metal, clothing, motor oil, lead-acid batteries, fluorescent bulbs, and printer cartridges.
According to Michael Youdelman, the Manager of the Recycling and Resource Management at Stony Brook, the university has a comprehensive recycling program, which consists of recycling construction materials in a three-acre facility on campus called “South Pilot.” This facility allows a significant amount of asphalt and broken concrete to be recycled for new construction works.
“We save the university millions of dollars by doing stuff like this,” said Youdelman, “just in a few years we saved $ 5 million.”
Stony Brook has 24,000 students, including 10,000 students who live on campus, who generate 4.000 pounds a week of trash. “Our numbers are no way near the same way as Harvard or other places because they do not have the infrastructure we have,” said Youdelman. He added that Stony Brook has a university medical center, veteran’s hall and other installations that other campuses may not have.
To raise awareness, Stony Brook has implemented recycling programs like RecycleMania, a national recycling and waste minimization competition that involves more than 500 universities. The program’s goal is to increase recycling participation by students and faculty, but Rabkin holds no support for the programs.
“It’s a silly program designed to give someone something to do and as an engineer, I have real work,” said Ilya Rabkin, 21, a student at Stony Brook.
Roytman doesn’t participate in these programs because are mostly focused in plastic. “Since is not profitable for companies to recycle plastic, it is up to the government to subsidize it because we lose money recycling.”
R. Lawrence Swanson, an Associate Dean and Director of the Waste Reduction and Management Institute at Stony Brook, asserted that to certain degree it’s probably correct that people recycle because it’s fashionable. “It may cost us extra money to recycle plastic, but we are not extracting oil from the ground to make a new bottle,” Swanson said, “ you are recycling that old one, so you can preserve for your grandkids a little bit of oil that may be left; this is the idea of sustainability.”
Michelle Pizer, president of the Student Environmental Club and a member of the Sustainability Task Force, said that Stony Brook has the logo “wear red, think green.” “Stony Brook may be thinking green but they certainly don’t act green a lot of the time,” said Pizer. “It would make a huge impact if Stony Brook would make similar changes to Southampton campus, which is a school based on sustainability and environmental progress.”
According to Swanson, the university and the employer’s unions should rewrite the contracts and allow the employers to participate in recycling activities. “It isn’t simply starting a recycling program; you have to get the personnel lined up to know how to do it.”
Another point that Swanson, who has been working 22 years at Stony Brook, emphasized is that one of the things that Stony Brook presidents have constantly grapple with is the intent to keep peace with the community around the university.
“When we had opportunities to do research in many ways more efficiently, our president typically says no because he is afraid that the community would say that we are dealing too much with pollution issues and it’s ruining the community that surrounds the university” he said. “Another important fact is that, in 1963 this community was here and the campus was plugged down in the middle of it, so there is a certain resentment of the community around.”
According to Swanson, Stony Brook is on the top campuses, between 15-20 percent of all campuses in U.S., when it comes to recycling. “We are not number one, but we have a difficult environment to work too,” he said. “We could probably do better if we were in New Hampshire.”
