Recent years have been difficult for recycling programs across the US and Canada. The market disruptions caused by China’s National Sword policy and contaminated materials have created tremendous financial pressure for local collection programs. Compounding this challenge has been a steady stream of media stories suggesting that recycling itself is “dying”. But is this really the case? While industry veterans have watched recycling survive and continue to grow through past market downturns, people outside the industry often lack this context to recognize that this situation…

Don’t miss part 1 of this blog series! I recall having a conversation with Jay Price, at the time the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s recycling manager, and who now oversees all sustainability initiatives. It was following a session about mini-bin deskside programs at the 2015 AASHE conference in Minneapolis, and Jay was actively focused on how to bring such a program to his campus. Flash forward to July 2020, the 30,000 FTE university has converted nearly 90% of campus to the My Tiny Trash system,…

Change comes slowly for most college and university waste reduction programs. Over time, layers of recycling, compost, and reuse collections are grafted onto a waste management system that otherwise remains unchanged. Institutional inertia, finite budgets, and the perception of recycling as a nice-but-not-essential operation conspire to keep trash the more convenient, default option in many situations. Trash bins are ubiquitous while the network of recycling bins only expands as grants or one-time funding becomes available. Housekeepers empty deskside waste baskets while staff and faculty are…

How do you motivate someone to recycle? You tell them what happens to it! I got my start in the recycling field as a student volunteer in the early 90’s. Every week we set up a tabling display on my university’s quad that talked about the environmental benefits of recycling. That message seemed obvious. It resonated with me personally as well as the other environmentally conscious students we spoke to. What we only slowly learned, and what most recycling educators now know is that this…