For RecycleMania, Gerri C. LeBow Hall Surrenders its Trash Cans
By Jared Brey
Tuesday morning, Kyle Kephart was laying out wooden pallets on the floor of the Drexel Recreation Center lobby and stacking them up with old electronic equipment from around the campus.
It had only been a matter of minutes since the RecycleMania collection event on Drexel University’s University City Campus had begun, but Kephart, the director of quality services in Facilities and Real Estate, estimated they’d already collected a few thousand pounds’ worth of electronics — certainly on track to beat the Queen Lane collection event last week, which filled six pallets. Later, the materials would be entered in a RecycleMania database and tallied up as part of the friendly competition between some 600 colleges and universities across the country, Kephart said.
Meanwhile, in Gerri C. LeBow Hall, Drexel employees are engaged in a less visible but just as important effort to improve the University’s recycling performance: They’ve surrendered the trash cans underneath their desks and replaced them with recycling bins. Now, when they want to throw something away, they have to walk to a trash can located centrally in their office.
The point of the exercise, said Scott Dunham, assistant director for Grounds Maintenance, is to make recycling waste ever-so-slightly easier and throwing it away ever-so-slightly harder. The Surrender Your Trashcan initiative was piloted in LeBow Hall starting last year. Since then, the recycling stream coming out of the building has been both cleaner — meaning it carries fewer un-recyclable materials — and more abundant, Dunham says. And because less food waste is being left under desks over nights and weekends, the initiative has helped with pest issues as well, according to Dunham.
“Just talking with the custodial managers, you get a sense that we’re pulling out a lot more recycling,” Dunham said.
Some people in the office were initially skeptical of the change, said Cheryl Renz, program manager in the Dean’s Office at the LeBow College of Business. Some employees thought the Surrender Your Trashcan initiative was part of a cost-cutting effort. But people have gotten used to it by now.
“If it’s making a difference in terms of labor or the earth that people are recycling more, then I think it’s worth it,” said Renz.
Both Renz and Dunham said that communicating in the early stages of the initiative could have gone better. People weren’t exactly sure what to expect, and the big trash cans that were meant to replace the desk wastebaskets weren’t available right away. But Dunham said it’s been successful, and he’s speaking with managers in other buildings to see if they’d be willing to participate.
“The main thing we want to get out to people to consider is, it is voluntary,” Dunham said. “And the benefits are twofold: a reduction in complaints for pest control, because food is not being left in your office overnight or over the weekend, and obviously, it cleans up the recycle stream coming out and increases it at the same time.”