Students go dumpster diving to promote recycling

It only looked like the Forum was taken over by spacemen in white jumpsuits midday Wednesday. Instead, it was the site of a waste audit done by members of Green-UR, an environmental group on campus.

From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., several students volunteered to sort through a dumpster full of trash in the center of the Forum and pick out items that should have been recycled.

This semester's audit coincided with environmental awareness week. Green-UR conducts one waste audit per semester.

There was a bin for every type of waste including regular trash, plastic, paper and aluminum as trashcans were spread across the Forum. Each trashcan had a specific label that told what could be thrown away in that particular one.

There were two tables where volunteers were stationed and where they brought their pile of trash to sort through. The dumpster, from the Jepson School of Leadership, contained one day's worth of trash, said Jerry Giordano, president of Green-UR.

The main goal of the waste audit was to inform students about how many recyclable items they throw away into regular trash bins every day, Giordano said. Scales were used to weigh each bin of trash to reinforce this point.

"The idea is just to show that there is a lot of mixing between what should be recycled and what should be thrown out in the trash," Giordano said. "By weighing everything out here people can see it and it more visual."

The members of Green-UR took part in this project not only to increase awareness about recycling on campus, but also because they are passionate about the environment and concerned about the future, some members said.

"I think that it is important for people to recycle because we're already running out of certain resources," junior Ana Neferu said. "It's so easy to recycle and still people don't do it. I don't understand why."

Alvaro Rios, a freshman, agreed with Ana.

"There's only one Earth and we have to take care of it," Rios said. "The consumerism of the 21st century is exhausting the Earth completely. This is a way of helping it."

Contact reporter Taylor Procopio at taylor.procopio@richmond.edu