The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/recycling/)
The Tompkins County Department of Recycling and Materials Management met on Tuesday, July 11 to request public feedback on its proposed 10-year solid waste plan, encountering municipal tensions over the future of waste reductions.
The annual Beyond Waste Campaign promotes Cornellians to reduce waste and adopt better recycling practices.
The Stache Lab at Cornell, led by Prof. Erin Stache, chemistry and chemical biology, has discovered an efficient way to decompose non-biodegradable plastic polystyrene
The Tompkins County Recycling Center announced in a statement on Feb. 12 that there will now be a fee for dropping off yard waste, previously free of charge, citing declining rates of recycling.
Dented cans, plastic cups and empty bottles litter Collegetown lawns and streets each weekend, yet many of these remnants disappear before Monday classes resume. But the aftermath of Cornell’s late-night parties does not magically vanish. Beyond regularly scheduled trash collection, a number of students and campus service groups have taken up the quiet task of removing the debris scattered around Collegetown. Jacob Llodra ’21 began collecting recyclables with one of his housemates during this year’s Orientation Week. He removes bottles and cans from streets and sidewalks each week and redeems them, earning five cents for each one he processes at Wegmans.
I raised my speckled, squished banana out of my backpack with a mission to find the nearest compost bin. My first stop: Trillium dining hall. As soon as I entered, I saw the row of large bins and posters and spotted the small, almost unnoticeable compost sign posted to the side of where the rest of the bins were. But there was no bin. As a Trillium employee exited from the kitchen, I asked if she knew where the compost bin was.
The University participates in the continent-wide sustainability competition for the 10th time to try to generate the least waste.
In the competition, campus waste is collected, weighed and compared to other universities in the categories of waste diversion, food organics and overall waste production from mid-February to the end of March.
As Cornell students we are expected to meet certain standards. Among these are high SAT scores, a high GPA, an intellectual curiosity and…recycling? The other day I went to Trillium for lunch. As I was throwing my garbage away I saw a Cornell employee came to stop me from throwing my water bottle into the trash. Apparently there was a special blue bin just for water bottles. I find this forced recycling not only to be a nuisance, but ineffective and inefficient. Recycling costs more than simply the disposing of trash and is based on the false premise that landfills are overflowing with garbage. Furthermore, the whole pro-environmental movement is taking the wrong approach to fixing the environment.