Washington University recycled 393,172 pounds of waste this spring to rank No. 35 out of 346 schools in the annual RecycleMania contest’s Gorilla category.
RecycleMania is a 10-week competition that pits WUSTL against other colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada to see which campus can prevent the most materials from ending up in a landfill. The contest ended March 27.
WUSTL finished in the top 11 percent nationally in RecycleMania’s Gorilla category, which is based on total recycled materials collected on campus.
The university’s 393,172 total pounds ranked No. 2 in the state of Missouri (behind the University of Missouri-Columbia), No. 3 among University Athletic Association rivals (behind Emory University and the University of Rochester), and No. 11 among private colleges and universities nationwide.
“Our university community should be commended once again for our continuing efforts to recycle our waste,” says Matt Malten, assistant vice chancellor for sustainability. “This demonstrates that our continued focus to improve the efficiency and understanding of our recycling program is providing good results.
“As always, while we always want to perform well in RecycleMania, we want to emphasize that efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle our material waste is important year-round and a key goal of our sustainability strategic plan,” Malten says.
The university also did well in the Per Capita Classic, ranking No. 82 of 346 schools (top 25 percent) with 16.97 pounds of recycled material per person.
With the debut of single-stream recycling on the Danforth Campus in January, WUSTL was unable to participate in RecycleMania’s targeted materials contests — including the paper competition, a category in which the university has excelled in the past, ranking No. 16 of 87 schools in 2009.
This year, 607 schools participated in those contests, the most in RecycleMania’s 10-year history.
According RecycleMania, 84.5 million pounds of recyclables and organic materials were recovered during the 2010 competition, which prevented the release of nearly 137,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to the annual emissions from 23,850 passenger cars, electricity use of 15,140 homes or the burning of 650 railcars’ worth of coal.
RecycleMania is administered by the National Recycling Coalition.
For more information on the contest or to see the full results, visit recyclemaniacs.org.
For information about recycling on the WUSTL campus, visit wustl.edu/sustain.