? As reported in the Nov. 2 issue of The Peninsula Beacon, the City of San Diego cannot afford to make recycling as accessible for apartment dwellers and businesses as it is for single-family residences, forcing many environmentally conscious citizens to seek out recycling drop-off and buy-back centers in the community.
Corporations and universities throughout San Diego are leading the green movement by setting a positive example of sustainable practices, often times picking up where the city left off.
Local colleges are not only making recycling available to their students, but also reaching out to today’s young people to promote environmental stewardship.
Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU) has developed a growing recycling program, thanks to the efforts of Celeste Howe.
Current Recycling Program Manager Renee Robertson explained that it was Howe who, after a trip to New Zealand, began to wonder why there was no recycling effort at PLNU.
“They have incredible waste management programs in New Zealand,” Robertson said. “They basically don’t throw anything away or landfill anything. So [Howe] just came back and started calling every day the physical plant. She started calling the president … and finally they said okay.”
Robertson explained that what began as a volunteer student position to assist in the program’s creation soon expanded into a paid position and the implementation of the Resource Stewardship Task Force.
The task force now brainstorms for recycling events, such as Creation Care Week, a week devoted to recycling and Christian stewardship principals, and RecycleMania, a nationwide college recycling competition.
Along with these events, PLNU’s recycling program is comprehensive, single-stream and commingled, meaning that paper, plastic and metal can all go in one recycling bin, Robertson said.
“We’ve got just about every different kind of recycle bin that is in existence on our campus,” she laughed. “There’s the desk-side bins – those are in all offices and in every dorm room – then we also use some taller bins for certain key areas, and then we use outdoor collection bins as well.”
The campus also makes universal waste recycling available, with bins in most dorm buildings and pickup throughout offices. Universal Waste, which was banned from household trash and landfills in February, includes batteries such as alkaline, lead acid, lithium, mercury and nickel cadmium (Ni-Cd); electronic devices such as cell phones, computer monitors, printers, cordless phones, CPUs, laptop computers, radios, telephone answering machines, televisions and VCRs; light bulbs such as fluorescent tubes, high intensity discharge, metal halide, neon and sodium light bulbs but excluding incandescent light bulbs; and mercury containing items such as gauges, switches, thermometers and thermostats.
Recycling is even emphasized during student move-in and move-out days. As students settle into their dorms, cardboard only dumpsters are available around campus for students to dispose of move-in boxes. As students move-out at the end of the year, donation stations for clothing and soft goods, non-perishable food items, cleaning products and personal hygiene products are provided for all the unwanted goods that typically would be left behind or dumped in the trash. Items collected are picked up by the San Diego Rescue Mission and the local chapter of Disabled American Veterans.
“Basically everything that people didn’t want to deal with went into [big containers],” Robertson said. “There was working computers, TVs, couches, clothes, all kinds of really great usable goods thrown away.”
PLNU’s efforts go beyond the typical. The campus implemented a food diversion program, which collects food left on student’s plates when they go into the dish cleaning area, as well as pre-consumer food waste, and hauls it to the Miramar Greenery where it is composted with other yard waste and turned into free compost for city residents, Robertson said. The university also hands out free plastic travel coffee mugs to every student in order to reduce waste from paper cups for coffee and soda.
For their initiative, PLNU was recognized by the city’s Environmental Services Department in their 2006 Waste Reduction & Diversion Awards as a San Diego Recycler of the Year.
The University of California, San Diego (UCSD), was also recognized for its green practices. UCSD has made great strides in energy efficiency by completing a retrofit project that changed the lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning in many campus buildings. Additionally, 85 percent of the university’s energy comes from its own co-generation facility, which also helps cool and heat water on campus.
The state school owns electric and hybrid vehicles and recently purchased two “fast chargers” that charge electric vehicles faster and use less energy doing so.
The university also meets the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver standards in all of their new construction and will be implementing LEED standards for existing buildings during future renovation projects.
“Because of our place in the education community, we definitely want to be leaders in sustainability,” said UCSD spokesman David Weil. “We want to be good stewards to the environment but it also helps us save money in the long run and that way it’s a good way to keep student fees down.”
Private corporations are also doing their part. In September, San Diego-based Cymer Inc., a leading supplier of laser light sources, picked up the city’s slack after grant funding for a municipal recycling event dried up.
Cymer hosted Cymer Cycle, a free electronic recycling event at Qualcomm Stadium in order to give the community a place to take their electronic waste, including broken and outdated electronics.
According to Leonard Robinson, chief deputy of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control, recycling such items is important.
“In computers you have lead, arsenic, chromium and various heavy metals and plastics that, once introduced into the environment, can cause contamination,” he said.
Robinson helped kick off the department’s Take-It-Back Partnership. The program is a collaboration of state, city and county governments with businesses, non-profit agencies and non-governmental organizations to provide free, local and convenient ways for California residents to dispose of universal waste, according to the department’s Web site.
Goodwill Industries was the first to join the Take-It-Back Partnership in San Diego County by accepting computers and computer related items only at all of their 24 San Diego County stores and free standing donation centers, including the 3663 Rosecrans St. location.
“We are a location that is very convenient and people bring things to us anyway,” said Michael Rowan, CEO of Goodwill Industries. “We can use computers, we can get them into reuse, we can sell the reusable units as well as the reusable parts and we’ve linked up with responsible recyclers [San Diego-based IMS Recycling] to recycle what’s left over.”
According to Robertson, one of the best things about most recycling programs is that they basically pay for themselves – a compelling incentive for the private sector in its pursuit of green practices, and perhaps one from which the city could benefit.
“We’re pretty close to budget neutral,” she explained. “We save so much money and we get rebates for our recycling, which comes off of our waste bill, so that pays for paid positions and some of the other promotional educational materials.”
In the final installment of this series on Nov. 30, The Beacon will take a comprehensive look at the city’s recycling efforts in recycling and ask why local government struggles to provide basic recycling services to a larger demographic and whether San Diego is doing enough to meet and exceed state mandates.