Operationally, collecting recyclables from summer programs is going to involve a series of mini surges in fairly targeted areas. For most summer programs, you are not going to have the consistency and regularity of ongoing collections that you have during the school year. Think of it as a series of extra long special events. Expect a surge of water and sport drink bottles in the athletic facilities from the week-long sports camp. Expect surges of materials in certain residence halls depending on where and how long folks are staying. Expect surges of food waste in the dining hall for certain periods of time. If you coordinate closely with your Summer Programs staff, you should be able to plan for these surges and schedule your pickups and/or extra bin deliveries accordingly.

One of the biggest keys to successful recycling during summer programs is to make sure everything is well labeled. Remember, most of these folks are new to campus. They don’t know your system and aren’t staying long enough to spend time learning it. Stuff has to be pretty obvious. If an attendee has something in their hand to discard, they should immediately be able to tell what bin it goes into. And they should be able to tell just by looking at the bin. Attendees shouldn’t have to download special guidelines or memorize a Rosetta stone of color codes just to figure out which bin their routine recyclables or trash goes into. They’re not going to be on campus that long. Things should be a lot more obvious than that.

In addition, for the program to work, attendees need to be able to find the right bins. Hopefully your recycling bins are aesthetic enough that you were able to place them in prominent enough locations that attendees can easily find them. However, there are cases in which you have trash and recycling areas that are harder to find. In those cases, what are you doing about that? I know the site has been there forever. I know that you and your staff know where it is. But how are individual attendees who are new to campus going to find it? Have you placed extra signage directing folks to that area? Or are you hoping that the telepathic messages that you broadcast from your office are reaching the intended audience and serving as sufficient directions? My psionic abilities may have waned over the years, but I have found that latter approach to be less effective that you might think.

If you really want to do additional ongoing education for the summer programs – other than ensuring that things are well labeled and the stuff you do at check in (see part 1 of his post) – consider doing something passive with little bits of information or reinforcement. Keep in mind that most of your conferences are pretty short. You don’t have time to run the kind of enlightenment and co-curricular education program that you might try to run with students during the school year.

If you have gone hiking on a nature trail and saw the signs that give you key facts about the area you are looking at, those are called interpretive programs. Think along those lines. Do you have your own interpretive program? Think about promotional posters to remind/reinforce certain behaviors at key points. Consider something near the trash and recycling rooms in the residence hall that conferences are staying at, sort of a “last line of defense” type of promotion to give one last reminder to get folks to put things in the right bin. Consider something near a vending machine reminding people why or where to recycle their empty bottles & cans on campus. If there is a particular classroom or meeting room that is being heavily used by a conference, consider something that is visible to folks on their way into or out of that space reminding folks to recycle. If there is a copy center on campus or a public copier in the library that is frequently used by conference attendees, consider a factoid about the benefits of paper recycling. Where possible, try to target it toward summer conference attendees so that they see it among the “white noise” of other posters, flyers, and signs. For example, you might want to use your own tonnage data and EPA’s WARM model and related equivalencies calculator to create something along the lines of “last summer Campus X recycled __ tons of material. Recycling that material instead of sending it to the landfill saved the energy equivalent of _____ gallons of gasoline.”

The summer programs season is almost here. What are you doing for recycling during your summer programs?

Over the years, I have seen some recycling and sustainability plans try to shut down over the summer. I’d urge you to really consider the potential impacts of doing so. Keep in mind that the summer programs season is typically over 20% of the calendar year. If you do not extend your recycling or sustainability programs to summer conferences, are you essentially saying that these programs don’t matter 1/5 of the year? What message does that send to your staff? Will it undermine your message and your program the rest of the year (i.e. “if this is so important, why don’t we do it in July,” or “you only do this for show when the students and parents are here.”)?

Assuming that you do target summer programs, keep in mind that you have the same sort of cycle you would have for the academic year (move in, orientation, main program, move out), just crammed into a much shorter period of a few days or a few weeks.

The baby ducklings

The moment that attendees arrive is one of the most important moments in your summer program. There is a point just after baby animals are born or hatch in which they imprint on the world around them. If you give a baby animal the wrong signals during this imprinting period, strange things can happen. It’s why wildlife rescue centers have to be very careful if the plan to release a newborn into the wild, because too much human interaction and domestication during this imprinting stage can make it impossible to effectively release that animal into the wild. It’s why every few years you hear the story about a baby duckling that got the wrong signals during imprinting and thinks it’s a dog. There is an imprinting moment as well with new students or new conference attendees. Sending the right signals during this imprinting period can make your program infinitely more effective. If you miss that imprinting moment, you could find yourself fighting against that bad imprinting throughout someone’s entire college career or summer conference stay.

The window to capture people’s attention and do this imprinting is very small. There is a moment when attendees first arrive on campus and check in. Chances are, they have not yet met friends or other attendees yet. They are in a new location, perhaps a new city or town, and are trying to orient themselves (where do I need to be for the conference tomorrow? Where can I get something to eat? What do I do for entertainment while I’m here? Etc.). There is a moment where they are reaching out for anything the help ground them, to help them imprint on their surroundings. The impression that you make right then at a welcome desk or registration table is to a large degree the impression they have and the resulting behavior they have the entire time they are guests on your campus. You may think that you are a “green” campus but how do they know that? If you don’t make the right imprint, you could find yourself with a bunch of baby ducklings acting like dogs.

KIPFS

Keep it painfully freaking simple. I don’t like the more traditional KISS acronym because I don’t think you’re stupid. Chances are you are passionate about this issue and want to share that passion as much as possible. This is not one of those times. This is a time when you have to be super-focused. Your window of opportunity is tiny. Your message has to be very simple, very universal, and helpful to incoming attendees. Once that moment is gone, it’s gone. This is not the time for lengthy diatribes about where your recyclables go. It is not the time to unveil complicated graphs and reams of information about your climate action plan. Keep it painfully freaking simple. “Welcome to campus X. While in the residence halls, you will be responsible for emptying your own trash and recycling. Please bring your items to the trash and recycling room (insert picture of room so they see what to look for) located here (maybe insert a simple map if you have one, especially if the location is not obvious), and place your stuff in the appropriate bin. The bins will be labeled (make sure they are), but if you ever have any questions contact (insert phone number, website, or QR code).” Or, if folks aren’t using the residence halls, you might want to substitute something more along the lines of “Welcome to campus X. While on campus, look for our recycling containers (insert picture of bins) located across campus. If you have any questions about recycling at campus X, please contact (insert phone #, website, or QR code).

Get that into every conference opening or orientation and you are done. Done. Walk away. At this point you are at risk of over-mixing the pancake batter and ruining the whole thing. You have given them a critical piece of info they need to help them orient themselves. With everything else they have to do to orient themselves and get ready for their conference, you have given them just enough info that they will retain it. Any more info, and most of them will overload and shut out all of it. And for anyone that does want more info, you have given them an easy way to get more info. I know you think the batter still looks lumpy and you want to keep mixing, but trust me walk away. You’re going to ruin it if you do any more.

Anything else should be part of your ongoing collection which I’ll cover in part 2 of this post.
The season for summer programs is here. What have you done to prepare for it?

For me, there are two types of tracking:

• Total campus tracking, and
• Building-by-building tracking.

I talked about total campus tracking in part 1 of this series. In this part 2, I am going to discuss building-to-building tracking (you could even drill down to floor-to-floor or department-to-department if so inclined). I think this type of monitoring is critical in order to see where your system is working and where it is breaking down.

Building-to-building monitoring works best in areas where you have “like” populations and where you have folks that have some control over their waste decisions. For example, this works really well in residence halls. It does not work so well comparing something like the bursars office to the library – because the vast majority of the differences between those two areas are dictated more by office function and type of waste generated than personal action. You could compare one of those areas against itself over time (e.g. this year, the library recycled “Y” amount of stuff whereas last year, it only recycled “X” amount of stuff), but inter-area comparisons usually don’t tell you much.

Building by building tracking is typically done by volume. It’s tough to get accurate weights for individual collection containers because you don’t typically have a scale handy at each building. Some trucks have the ability to weigh containers as they dump them, but I have heard too many cases of significant problems with the accuracy of such scales to recommend them. However, as long as you keep your collection container uniform (say a 65 gallon Toter cart or a 40-gallon Rubbermaid Brute), you can have staff track how full those carts are when they pick them up (I usually ask folks to trash by 1/4s, 1/4 full, 1/2 full, 3/4 full, etc.). That will give you a pretty good comparison point for inter-building monitoring and tracking. If you have relatively fixed populations and known populations (i.e. residence halls) you can turn those volumes into pretty good per-capita numbers.

No matter how good you think your system or infrastructure is, there are places on campus where it works better than others. Building by building monitoring can help you figure out where and why. If you do these sorts of comparisons long enough, I actually think you should get an honorary degree in human behavior because the reasons for the discrepancies are varied and often amazing. In general though, there are two categories that you can group the variations into. One is staff and logistics variations. The other is variations among the waste generators.

Using per building monitoring, you can often tell the difference between buildings in which collection staff are proactive and helping, and those in which they are doing things that undermine your program. It is typically only a few rare cases in which someone is deliberately undermining your program. More often than not, the differences are more subtle and how folks deal with contamination and storage issues. Some staff will use even the slightest excuse to dump a slightly contaminated bin as trash, especially if they perceive the trash collection to be more effective than the recycling. From my perspective, I think that is evidence of the need to fix that discrepancy so that recycling is just as effective as trash pickup and there is no incentive to throw stuff into the trash. Regardless of your resolution to the problem, having these monitoring data points really helps to pinpoint where the issues are.

The other big variation that you see is on the waste-generator site of things. If we are talking about residence halls, we are talking about variations in student behavior. And in 20 years of doing this in residence halls, I have found more variations than you could ever imagine. Tracking and monitoring will let you see where those variations are occurring.

One of the things that you may quickly find with building by building monitoring is how easy your recycling bins are to find. Do you have residence halls in which your recycling rate drops significantly compared to its peers in September when the students move in and in May when they move out? Go back and take a look at how easy your recycling site is to find. Put yourself in the shoes of a new student, or the friend or family member who is helping your student to move in or move out (the folks who often end up with the job of taking stuff down to the recycling bins). Pretend you don’t know anything about the building you are in. Can you find the recycling site? Are there signs to guide you to it? If it’s in a special recycling room behind a closed door, is there a sign on the door of that room that tells you what the room is?

Some of you who have read one of my previous posts or seen one of my presentations have heard about my insistence on parallel access (having trash and recycling containers located in the same area – visibly different from one another but in the same area). Some of my earliest discoveries of parallel access were forged out of one of these monitoring-related discoveries. We had a residence hall where the monitoring was showing we just weren’t getting enough paper, compared to the other halls. Something was wrong. As I started going back to the bins, I made a vile discovery. We were throwing away most of our barrels of paper because students were throwing up into them. It was a party dorm, so much so that we had students getting sick fairly often, and so drunk that they couldn’t make it down the hall to the bathroom. To their credit, the students knew they didn’t want to vomit on the carpeted floor so they were looking for the first trash can they could find. In their travels, they came upon the recycling room, which had a nice big recycling barrel in it (several of them actually), but no trash can. The trash room at the time was way on the other end of the hallway. As a result, my paper bin became their personal vomitorium. Whenever you think you are having a bad Monday, imagine opening a bin from which you are expecting just to be fishing out a few extra inappropriately-placed pizza boxes, and encountering that. Routinely. In a somewhat desperate attempt to stop the issue, I started placing a wastebasket in the recycling room. The results, from a recycling perspective were amazing. I don’t think we ever had another contaminated bin again (except for the time someone emptied the wastebasket and forgot to put it back). Once I’d made that discovery, I started going back to the route sheets and discovered pretty uniformly that in sites where we had parallel access, we had significantly higher recycling than in sites where the trash and recycling were separated. There were a few sites in which that wasn’t the case, but upon further investigation, I found that in most of those anomalous sites, we did have the same issue. However, in those buildings, we had a few staff that were going above and beyond and removing the contamination themselves.

I’d add something pithy about necessity being the mother of invention, but honestly, I think I’ve spent too much time on this vile little flashback. Just remember that other trash may be less foul, but if you don’t have a trash bin to put it in, that trash will end up contaminating your recycling. And a system of building-by-building monitoring can help you discover where that is occurring.

Many of the system breakdowns that you see with monitoring are significantly less gross, but no less important. Sometimes it’s genuine confusion about what can and cannot be recycled. Knowing that allows you to augment or fix your existing signs and labels. Sometimes it’s a student coming from a culture that does not recycle, so a lot of extra education is needed. When you know that, you can resolve that issue. Sometimes it is a case where you just have the wrong bins. I have had buildings where students were partying and when the recycling bin first fills up, all the extras go into the trash. Knowing that allows you to add a larger recycling bin and solve the issue. All of them are solvable issues. But first, you have to know where the problems are. And building-by-building monitoring lets you figure that out.

The trick is how to recover those materials and for whom. For those of you who are still finalizing your end of the year plans, I am hoping that you find this information helpful.

Where are you asking folks to leave stuff?

As I hopefully sufficiently indicated in my previous posts “The end is near” and “The Move-Out Surge Begins,” this is a chaotic time of year. If you are asking folks to set aside their unwanted clothes, furnishings, or other belongings, that is one more thing to add into the mix.

If setting stuff aside can be done with little extra effort (e.g. place your unwanted stuff in the dedicated corner of the lounge on your way out to the car), you are far more likely to get people to participate than if it requires greater extra effort (e.g. there is a collection trailer 6 buildings away in the oppose direction from the car).

Also, keep in mind that how well you keep your piles organized will determine how people reciprocate. If you are asking folks to segregate their stuff into separate piles, what are you doing to keep those collection areas segregated and organized? If you can keep your pickups frequent enough to keep your collection area looking organized, most folks will respond in kind. However, if you don’t stay on top of the collections and allow the piles to blend together into one big heap things will get disorganized in a hurry and you will have to spend a lot of time sorting through the pile later (which increases the likelihood that stuff gets thrown away in the process).

Who is doing your collections?

This is the single biggest issue for end-of-year collections. The student volunteers that you would typically rely on for this sort of thing are busy with their own exams or move-out and typically not available to help. Your operations staff is already crazy-busy getting the campus ready for Commencement. The charity you are working with may have volunteers, but there may be liability or security issues with having those volunteers on campus, especially in buildings, during that time of year.

Typically this is going to fall on a single dedicated staff person, and a box van or whatever other vehicle can be spared for them. To help that person, you might want to look at one or more of the following options:

• Student workers who live off campus. They will still have exams to contend with but typically don’t have to move out until their lease is up at the end of June so they may be more available than students who live on campus;
• Alumnae groups. They already know and have a relationship with the campus. This may especially be viable if your campus has alums come back as part of Graduation/Commencement ceremonies.
• Starting summer workers early. Many schools hire local high school students (especially children of folks who work on campus). Is there a way to start that program early so that some of those summer workers could start early to help with move-out cleanup?

What is your goal?

Before you start trying to find an outlet for the stuff the students leave behind, stop and ask yourself what your primary goal is.

• Do you just want to make the stuff go away? That is not an ignoble goal. Disposing of all that stuff can rack up considerable trash disposal fees, funds that could be better used elsewhere on campus.
• Are you looking to make money from this stuff? As you will repeatedly hear from folks on campus that have experience with Ebay, flea markets, or yard sales, some of the stuff left behind has value. Just remember though that when you do this as a campus, there are labor costs and liability issues that you have to deal with. If you need to make money, consider working with a textile recycler, or consider having students sell their own stuff before they leave (a residence hall-wide tag sale might be a viable final hall activity) as opposed to trying to do it with university labor after they leave.
• Community relations – do you want to use the items left behind to help those in need in your community? You might choose this option either from a purely altruistic perspective, a town-gown relations perspective, or a campus marketing perspective (or maybe even a little of all three).

Finding an outlet

When looking for a local outlet, keep in mind that there are several different types of end users.

Local shelters and survival centers

Local shelters and survival centers donate reusable items directly to folks in need in your local community. If you are looking to maximize your altruism and community relations benefits, these folks will often give you the best bang for the buck. However, unfortunately they can also pose logistical challenges, so if you just want to make stuff go away, they may not be your best partner. Keep in mind that these organizations are typically operating on razor thin margins, rely primarily on volunteer labor (and often volunteer trucks), and have limited storage space. The combination of their logistics and their mission often means that they can only take the most reusable of items. It also typically means that you will end up doing a lot of work on your end, though I have often found that the net result is well worth it.

At some point in any of these collections, you will be exhausted from having spent your third day straight of dealing with mountains of used clothes and facing dozens more piles to deal with before you leave for the day. There will be that moment when you ask yourself what the heck you are doing to yourself and whether it is worth it. When you are working with local shelters and survival centers and you see first-hand the grateful looks on the faces of, or in the eyes of, the folks receiving these donations, you remember why you are doing it and it gives you the boost you need to get through the rest of your day. Likewise, with students or parents triple-parked and the frantic pace to get everything packed up and moved out, you are asking them to take a few extra moments to bring their unwanted stuff to the donation area. Knowing that those items are going to a local shelter can sometimes make the difference between people taking those few extra moments to participate and just leaving stuff piled up next to the trash dumpster.

Thrift stores

These are local charities who are selling usable items to fund their primary mission. This can range from local chapters of national organizations like Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and Saint Vincent de Paul, to local organizations that run a thrift store to fund a hospice center or food pantry. The larger of these organizations are often very well organized and can provide excellent logistical support, including frequent pickups, collection containers, and other support. Many of these larger organizations also typically have a secondary market division so the stuff that can’t be immediately re-sold can at the thrift store, can often be re-sold to cleaning rag markets, international textile markets, and other used textile markets. As a result, these organizations may provide you with the best balance of logistical viability and altruistic payback. As an added bonus, many of these organizations have textile recycling programs on the back end to manage the materials that aren’t of sufficient quality to resell. To maximize your altruism benefits of working with these types of organizations, look for those who run their program as a job-training program.

Textile Recyclers

Textile recycling is one of the oldest forms of recycling in the country. Find someone old enough and you can still hear stories about rag men coming around to collect scraps. That industry is still going strong today. SMART is a national textile recycling organization that can teach you more about this fascinating industry.

The clothes that we cannot wear live on as cleaning rags, and filtration products, and even insulation. In addition, there is a thriving overseas market for torn and mismatched clothes. I have seen presentations recently about some amazing overseas tailors who take our discarded torn and mismatched clothes and transform them into designer pieces for the local market.

The advantage of working with textile recyclers is that they will typically pay you something for your used textiles. However, in many cases you need enough quantity to play in their world which means tractor trailer loads of dry materials. Some brokers will aggregate smaller loads and still cut you a share of the profits, but in general, you need volume to make this work.

Working with textile recyclers may be your best option when you need to get a financial return for your used clothes. However, if you are selling your program based on altruism (either to the folks participating in the program, or to the administrators you are asking to support the program), this option may not provide you with the altruistic returns you are looking for.

The end is near. What are you doing to prepare for it?

Earth Day is again upon us. For some it is the beginning of the annual migration of the groove band and hippie drum circle. It is comforting to see once again as they take up their permanent summer residence in the parks and open spaces of northern cities, back yet again from wherever it is that they migrate during the colder winter months to spend the chrysalis stage of their life cycle. In my fantasies I imagine there is a small island off the coast of South America where the drum circle and groove band pupa emerge and begin their northern migration.

When you spend a career in the environmental field, Earth Day is often seen as a big deal. I am enough of a pathological moderate and frequent contrarian that I might ordinarily spend an entire Earth Day post obsessing on the fact that our environment is in worse shape now than it was in 1970 when Earth Day began. For those of you who need that sort of thing, I’ll leave a simple link to an article from several years ago and move on.

I actually see signs of hope. For the last few years, I have seen a group of bright young college students that is as engaged in environmental issues as any group I have seen in my life (recent surveys may suggest they are not in the majority but their level of conviction and action makes up for some of the collective apathy of their peers). I see green-building standards increasingly part of the building codes in many areas. In my personal life, I see signs of hope as well. I blog for a company that makes high-aesthetic recycling containers almost entirely out of recycled plastic, and uses wind power to do so. Having started in this field at a time when the only recycling bins available were virgin plastic 12-gallon curbside collection tubs, cardboard boxes, and re-purposed trash cans, I still sometimes marvel at how far we have come. I commute to another job (albeit too far) in a car that gets 45-50 mpg. I shower (albeit too long) in a shower that uses less than 1.5 gallons per minute. Many of my meals each week are frequently organic and frequently vegetarian (I know that for some of you that are more die-hard vegetarians “frequently vegetarian” is kind of like saying “a little bit pregnant” but I would counter by urging you to go back and read my “Learning to Bunt” post). I look around my semi-conservative (by New England standards) town and see a surprising number of solar panels and hybrid cars. I look around at campus Facilities & Physical Plant operations across the country and see a surprising number of service and trades workers in electric cars where you once would have seen idling gas and diesel engines.

But I also see an urgent need to build on that hope so that we continue to make progress and don’t waste yet another opportunity. If you haven’t read my earlier “Learning to Bunt” post, I urge you to go back and do so. I think we are at a time when we desperately need to keep the momentum going and to keep getting base hits and making real progress. We can’t squander this opportunity by reverting to the “strike out swinging for the fences” mentality that has failed so many times in the past.

For those of you who use Earth Day to launch environmental regulations, if your goal is success rather than demagoguery, I would urge you to look at your approach. Two of the most powerful forces in the history of civilization are tight wads and robber barons. Does your legislation set up a framework where they thrive by “doing the right thing” environmentally? And in the process do they do the heavy lifting for you to get to where you want to go? Or are you advocating for a more dictatorial piece of legislation that will try to force change? If so, will all of those tight wad and robber baron forces align against you, or worse yet, ignore and undermine you, joined by the equally-powerful advocates for freedom who will oppose any dictatorship, even a benign one? Will your legislation fail, not because of the invalidity of your ideals, but rather by the self-imposed obstacles of its design?

For those of you who are using Earth Day to make personal changes, I urge you to focus your sudden burst of environmental motivation on those changes in which a single change will have a lasting impact. Put in the water saving shower head or sink aerator so that every day thereafter you use a little less water. Switch out some of your lights to energy efficiency ones so that every day thereafter, you are using a little less energy. Plant a tree that will every day thereafter breathe a little bit of CO2 out of our atmosphere. If you’re looking at a bigger purchase, weatherize your home, or buy a fuel efficient vehicle. Don’t get so caught up in the “Earth Day is Everyday” moment that you set unrealistic future daily expectations for yourself, expectations that are bound to fail. If you’ve never used a reusable bag in your life, chances are you’re not going to suddenly use one every time you shop. If you’ve never been anything but a hard-core carnivore, you’re not going to suddenly flip a switch and eat nothing but sliced tofu the rest of your life. Let’s face it; the last week of April is historically filled with as many broken promises as a fad diet, the second day of Lent, and an empty fitness club 3 weeks after New Year’s. Just like eating healthy means a realistic and consistent change in behavior, so too do more-environmental behaviors. If your Earth Day pledge is akin to expecting Ted Nugent to adopt a vegan diet, don’t waste your time (unless by “adopting a vegan diet” you mean him eating vegan animals).

I urge every one of you to do something this weekend to make a positive environmental impact. Start small and build on your momentum. In the meantime, if your Earth Day involved a little too much patchouli, if you have overdosed on craft-jewelers and Frisbee-golf demonstrations, if you are tired of playing bocce or ring toss with trash, or if you are reeling from the paradox of buying an organic vegan oat bar served on a disposable Styrofoam plate, the Contrarian in me would like to help you re-center by offering up this link to Patton Oswalt’s “I hate hippies” rant.

Never underestimate the power of a lot of people doing little things. It’s how we developed a lot of these environmental problems in the first place and I think it will be a big part of how we fix them.

And the beauty of Earth day is that it really is every day. If you got too busy watching the Frisbee throwing demonstration at the Earth day festival and ran out of time to switch to the energy saving light bulb you can still do that the next day and you will still make an impact. And even if you feel like there is something you absolutely can only do on Earth day, don’t panic. I’m pretty sure the drum circle pupa will hatch and begin their northern migration again next year.

For me, there are two types of tracking:

• Total campus tracking, and
• Building-by-building tracking.

In this part 1, I will talk about total campus tracking and do building by building tracking as part 2 of this series.

Total campus tracking is usually done by weight. That will typically give you an aggregated campus total weight. It won’t tell you where on campus something came from, but it will give you a very good idea of total campus activity. The data that you get from total campus tracking works well to measure the impacts of systems. For example, at one of my schools, we made a shift from picking up office paper via centralized containers in departmental offices to picking up office paper from each desk. By tracking the total campus weights, I was able to see the dramatic increase in paper recycling that resulted from that switch – our paper recycling totals more than doubled in the years after that switch.

Here’s another example of where total campus data helps. At one of the schools that I used to work with, I would watch their monthly trash and recycling totals. One of the things that I noticed is that their recycling percentages dropped dramatically in December or January every year in a way that didn’t make sense to me. After looking into it, what I found was that there was a major discrepancy between our collection system for recycling and our collection system for trash. Our collection system for trash was a standard automated truck that hydraulically dumped full dumpsters of trash without any lifting. By contrast, our recycling system involved a lot of manual lifting of bags of material and manual loading of the truck. In the winter, when there was a lot of snow plowing and shoveling work, and a lot of those folks had already worked a lot of overtime – they were so tired that it was a real struggle to do all the manual lifting that was needed to make recycling happen. Because they struggled to keep up with the collections, most of the recyclable materials found their way into the trash. Using that as one of the justifications, we were able to justify switching to a system that used a truck and carts that collected the recyclables hydraulically. After we did, the problem went away because it was now just as easy to collect the stuff for recycling as it was to collect it as trash.

To make total campus tracking work, wherever possible, I think you need to strive to get a weight for all the stuff on campus. To get a waste hauler to do that, you need a full or nearly full unit (either a full truck or a full compactor) that will go from the campus to a site with a truck scale. With a compactor, that’s not much of an issue because chances are, you are not hauling a roll-off or compactor unless it is predominately full. It is a little trickier when you have someone coming with a truck to pick up loose dumpsters on campus. If a hauler is doing that, their goal is to maximize that truck and they are not going to want to break away from their route to go weigh a less than full truck. If you have enough to fill or predominately fill a truck, it is fairly easy to get them to give you a weight as a standard practice. For anything less, you are probably going to have to pay a premium to get them to divert the truck over to a scale to give you a decent scale weight. I still think the data that you get is well worth the added expense, but people do need to be aware of the added expense.

What are you tracking? What is it telling you about your recycling program?

You forgot how little room is in the trunk of the family car. It seems a lot smaller than you remember. Yeah, you should have planned better to rent a storage unit over the summer, but you got busy and didn’t. And quite frankly, you’re still not sure it would have been worth paying to store some of this stuff. Maybe you shouldn’t have accumulated all this stuff but you did. You’re not even really sure how it happened. It just did.

Now that moment is here. The school didn’t leave you a lot of time to figure this out. It seems like exams just ended and now there are residence life staff pacing the halls telling you that you only have 20 minutes left to move out. Your parents are there to help you, but they are getting increasingly frantic. They’re double parked and worried about getting a ticket. They’re realizing that it’s not all going to fit. Everyone is starting to get tense. It’s decision time.

What are you going to leave behind?

Let’s start with some of the furniture. The repurposed lumber and blocks can go back into the trash from whence they came. And that old chair that came from Gramma’s basement – yes, it’s got some family history, but it doesn’t have much life left in it. You could let that go. That might free up some room.

Will you leave behind all of your old notes and reading materials? Maybe. Will you need any of those for your classes next semester? Not a lot of time to sort through stuff. Grab what you know you need. Maybe the rest can be left behind.

What about all of your old clothes? You need clothes. You like a lot of that stuff. Some of that stuff you never really wear. Some of it will be out of fashion next year. Some it was gifts and not something you would ever wear anyway. OK, let’s leave some of that, that will free up some room. No time to argue with increasingly tense parents about why you didn’t wear some of this stuff. Have to keep moving. Res life staff is getting increasingly impatient. Have to keep packing.

OK, that’s not enough, you still need to get rid of more stuff. Get rid of the desk organizers and all that stuff. That’s bulky and is likely to break when you cram it into the car. And someone’s yelling that replacing that next year is probably cheaper than the parking ticket you’re going to get if you stay double parked any longer. Just a little more. What else. What else would you leave behind?

This scenario is about to play out a lot of times this spring. There are over 1,500 4-year colleges and universities across the U.S. and almost all of them have some portion of their enrollment that lives on campus and has to move out at the end of the year.

When those students move out, there is a huge surge of trash that goes along with it. At more residential schools, it is not uncommon to see trash totals nearly double the month that students move out.

The surge is coming. What are you doing to get ready for it?

One of the cardinal mistakes that I think most people make is to assume that because you have a funding need and someone else has funding to give that you are automatically a good match. Too often, I think that presumption leads to frustration and ill will. A successful funding match needs a little more.

This is one of those times in which clichés exist for a reason. The really is no such thing as a free lunch. You have to ask yourself, what does this potential funder need to get in exchange for providing me with funding? Is that something that you can provide to them? If so, at what cost?

Yes, you did read that previous sentence correctly. I think that evaluating every funding situation requires its own benefit cost evaluation. One of the hardest things to do is to walk away from a potential funding situation. But if the costs of getting that funding outweigh the benefits, I think you have to be objective and walk away. Does chasing a particular funding source take you too far away from your core mission? Will it take so much of your time and so many of your already-limited resources that it will leave you unable to complete your core job? Will it impact your credibility?

Sidenote on credibility: To me, the key to recycling is to get more people to participate more often. I think there are 3 keys to doing so:

• The recycling system has to be easy to understand
• The recycling system has to be convenient – at least relative to the alternative which is throwing something into the trash
• People have to feel that their efforts are credible

 
If people don’t feel that their efforts are credible, they start to think “why bother” and it becomes harder and harder to overcome that. I’d encourage you not to take the credibility issue too lightly.

What is the funder looking for?

Every funder has a different motivation and something that they need to get back in exchange for their funding. Understanding that motivation can be a key to finding the right funding match.

Transparent Agenda grants

These sorts of relationships tend to be fairly straightforward. Grantor has specific thing that they want in exchange for their funding. In the recycling world this is typically composed of three models. There are grants tied to the recycling of a specific material. Typically a government agency or non-profit agency wants to increase the recycling of a certain material. If you generate a quantity of that material that you would like to do a better job of recycling, they may be able to provide funding for a pilot program or some capital equipment costs to help you recover those materials.

Over the years, I have also seen some transparent advertising options that would fall into this “transparent agenda” funding category. Basically a vendor would offer to provide you with free public area bins in exchange for you allowing them to sell advertising on a custom “billboard panel” or header board. Although I like the transparency of this dynamic, it may be a poor fit for some grantees. Often the folks selling the advertising want carte blanche when it comes to selecting the advertisers which might be a problem for some institutions. Also remember that public area recycling bins don’t just capture recyclables, they portray your institution. For some institutions, advertising is not a problem. However, for many institutions, the risk of having their public bins perceived as looking “like a Nascar car” (something that was told to me once by an administrator to whom I tried to present this option) is not the public image they are looking to promote.

I would also suggest that outsourcing operations fits this same transparent agenda model. Basically the contractor would agree to give you the equipment that you need in exchange for signing a long-term service contract with them. If you can’t otherwise capitalize your container and equipment needs this is an option to consider.

Product Promotion Grants

These are typically tied to the promotion of a particular product or brand. At its core, this is essentially a relationship in which the grantor is willing to provide you with the equipment that you need in exchange for some positive promotion about their product or company. The trick is that often neither the granter nor your institution wants the relationship to be that transparent. My more negative friends might term this a “hidden agenda” grant.

Essentially, the grantor is not looking so much for blatant advertising, but more subtle promotion and exposure. Think more along the lines of PBS (e.g. “funding for this program provided by ____”) than commercial broadcasting. This may also fall along the lines of “our product is good” messaging. For example, plastic bag recycling has evolved into a legitimate market, but was helped for many years by free equipment by folks that were looking to reinforce the message that “plastic bags are recyclable and therefore it is OK to use them.” If you were looking to remove bags from your waste stream, these equipment grants were often critical to being able to develop such programs.

Whether this sort of funding is viewed as positive corporate responsibility or negative greenwashing often depends on the pre-existing lens with which someone views these sorts of things. Just be aware that you may get some pushback from folks who will view it as the latter.

Funding Legacy Projects

Looking for “legacy” projects in which the good that they do is going to outlive the year that they spent the money. Looking for “I started this,” or “I expanded this.” Ideal for many recycling projects. If you can figure out how to make the ongoing costs work, this may be able to provide the one-time capital costs to make program work.

Funding Transformation

This sorts of funders are looking for “transformative” projects. This sort of funding can be fool’s gold from a recycling or sustainability operations perspective. You would think that funding the implementation of recycling or sustainability projects would qualify under this category. However, in many cases, these sorts of funders are not so much looking to fund capital projects, which they would find too mundane, but rather other non-capital “transformations.” Using a different campus example, these are the kind of folks that would not pay at all into a general alumnae fund, but would donate heavily to create a particular scholarship to transform the life of a student who might not otherwise be able to pay to attend the institution. In the recycling or sustainability world, this sort of funding tends do go toward a particular research project or to overhaul a type of curriculum and not to buy bins and equipment. You may be able to roll/hide your operational needs into a bigger transformative project, but such funders are not likely to fund your needs on their own and may not fund them at all.

So before you ask someone for that free lunch, do you have what you will need when the bill comes?

You could start chasing rainbows looking for the lucky Leprechaun with the pot of gold. But chances are, you need something a little more strategic than that. Here are some sources to consider:

Sources to look to for funding

• Campus Resources
• Government Grants
• Industry & Trade Group Grants
• Foundation and non-profit grants
• Outsourcing

Campus Resources

Too often the failure to fund recycling bins and equipment comes down to the budget line you are trying to take the money out of. Often that is a custodial budget that never really got adjusted for the additional recycling bin needs, or a bare-minimum recycling pilot program budget. Both options work for an initial purchase of basic deskside recycling bins but often do not allow for the purchase of other collection carts, more-aesthetic bins, or other equipment.

However, that is not the only budget on campus and some other budgets may be better suited to your needs:

Consider implementing that part of your program as part of a construction or renovation project. Several thousand dollars for recycling bins or equipment might be a huge hit to the “wastebasket” line item of your custodial budget (if such a line item even exists – too often such purchases mean taking money out of the general cleaning supplies budget line).  However in the scope of a construction or renovation project that has a budget of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, it is a very small percentage of the total project cost. And to get bins that augment the architecture and aesthetics that the campus just spent years planning, it may well be worth it for campus planners to roll your bins into their capital project budget.

There may also be campus grants through an on-campus foundation or through the student government. If there is something that is important to the students (say a new high-profile recycling bin in the campus center or student union), this may be a place to turn for funding. However, in my opinion, you should be very careful about how you use this type of funding. I think a core justification of many campus recycling programs is that they are saving the campus and the students money compared to the cost of landfilling. If you go back to students too often for funding, especially for ongoing costs, I think you run the risk of tipping the balance and making yourself a net cost to the students.  Doing so could undermine your program and make you a target for cuts in difficult budget times.

Another often overlooked option is to develop a “business” relationship with the alumnae office or foundation on campus. Not that you are looking for an alumnae donation, but rather than you are looking to buy the bins to help them secure other alumnae donations. The alumnae office or foundation is in the business of soliciting donations for the campus. One issue that they increasingly deal with in recent years is socially and environmentally-responsible giving. Many of the folks giving them money are looking to see that the folks receiving the money are meeting certain environmental and social criteria. As I noted in my earlier “Green But Unseen” post, high-aesthetic recycling bins can be an important way to showcase a green building or green campus. As a result, if approached the right way, the Alumnae Association or Foundation may be willing to fund some high profile, high aesthetic recycling bins in key locations if they can use them to help showcase the campuses commitment to the environment or sustainability to potential donors.

And don’t forget safety.  Will your new bins improve safe lifting on campus and decrease worker injury?  Will your new system improve fire safety and egress issues?  If so, be sure to sell the financial benefits of those improvements.  There may not be a specific budget line in the EH&S budget that can pay for your bins.  However, showcasing the safety-related benefits of your new bins and system will definitely help your cause when you make the case for why “general fund” budgets should be spent on your new recycling sytem.

Government grants

Typically tied to some issue the government agency is trying to advance. Watch to see when your state does a waste characterization study. After that study there is often an item that is shown to be a surprisingly high percentage of the waste stream. Agencies frequently follow with a round of grants soon after to show that they are addressing that issue.

Sometimes funding can’t go directly to you. Especially if you are a private campus, some government programs may be prohibited from giving money directly to you. To participate, you may need to partner with another entity, say your local municipality.

Also, when soliciting such money, be careful of institutional restrictions. Many institutions have policies in which a portion of any grant that comes in is withheld to cover campus administrative costs. Make sure you know that going in and plan accordingly rather than finding yourself just a little bit short of funding to finish your project.

Industry and Trade Group Grants

These trade groups typically represent the interests of a single type of industry (e.g. The Steel Recycling Institute, the Association for Post Consumer Plastics Recycling, the American Forest and Paper Association, etc.). Check in with these groups, as they sometimes have grants or other resources to fund projects that would further their specific industry.

Foundations

These are non-governmental organizations. Typically each has its own set of unique criteria regarding the types of projects it will fund. It may be worth talking with a grants or development officer on your campus or in your organization. Chances are, they have a network of foundations that they are already working with, and might help you find one what would be appropriate for your particular project.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing can be a touchy subject. When outsourcing is done just to put downward pressure on salaries, I have to admit, I am not a huge fan of that practice. However, where I do think that outsourcing can be of tremendous value is that it can often allow you to obtain the capital funding for containers and equipment that you would not otherwise be able to fund. It’s not free money. You will pay that cost off over time in the cost of the resulting service contract. But for some schools that have a hard time funding capital costs and need more steady line item funding (as opposed to a big capital expense once a decade or so, and a lower annual cost in between), outsourcing can be a way to achieve that consistent annual funding that you need.

If you are looking for capital funding for the containers and equipment that you need to take your program to the next level, look in a variety of places. When you do, you might find that your “rainbow’s end” is closer than you think.

The best way to explain this is with some hunting references and analogies. For those of you who are opposed to hunting for food, before you start dusting off your old Ted Nugent hate mail to resend to me, and lest this content gets lost in any controversy about hunting, let’s assume I am talking about nature photography. The analogies work either way.

What are you after?

What is the goal of your education program? If you just say “I’m going hunting” and walk into the woods without any preparation or understanding about what you are after, the only thing you are likely to come back with is some combination of sore feet, dehydration, a rash, or lyme disease. Who is your target audience? What to you hope to accomplish with your education program? Do you have the right tools and approach to get what you need?

Broadcasting your message

Unfortunately, an all too common approach to recycling and sustainability education is to broadcast a generic message as far and wide as possible. This is the equivalent of standing in an open field with a shotgun or telephoto lens, spinning around in a circle and shooting until you run out of ammo or film. On the positive side, you might get a target you would not otherwise have thought possible. Everyone hears the stories or has the stories (e.g. the one jock on a campus of 20,000 students who has never done anything environmental in their life but who “found religion” after going to a certain environmental event). But for the most part, this approach is a waste of film/ammo. Even in the above success-story, the status quo remains 99.995% unchanged. Those are good odds if you are talking about a soap’s capacity to kill germs. They are not good odds if you are talking about behavior change.

The other problem with the shotgun approach is that when you distribute a message that broadly, the message is typically so generic that the only people it has any impact on are people who are already receptive to that message. If your goal is only to reinforce existing behavior, that is one thing. But if your goal is to expand your program and to reach people who are not already participating, this is a waste of money. Shifting back to the hunting analogy, you can spend a lot of money to distribute duck lures all throughout an area and feel really good about your “hunting lure” coverage, but it doesn’t do you any good if you are trying to hunt deer.

Selecting a target

As I have mentioned in other blogs, there is a full spectrum bell curve of participation. On one hand, there are a few people on one extreme who will do what you want them to no matter what. On the other, there are a few people who will not do what you want them to no matter what and who are not worth wasting effort on. If you want to affect mass scale behavior change, you need to focus on the remaining 90+ percent of your target audience are somewhere in the middle. Keep in mind though that the middle 90% are not uniform. That “middle block” is made up of a lot of little clusters and chunks and stray pieces. If you systematically tweak your approach and message to each cluster, pretty soon you can reach much more of that 90% than you initially thought possible.

Mind the gap

Don’t be excited by behavior change, expect it. Approach your education program as a “gap analysis.” Assume that someone should be doing what you want them to be doing and work backwards. What is keeping them from doing it? Is it a lack of infrastructure, a lack of information, a lack of awareness, or just a little reinforcing nudge to get them to choose the right option? The answer is going to be different for each group of people. Change your tools accordingly. The stuff you need for duck hunting is different than the stuff you need for hunting elk.

Some people are never going to become environmentalists. The great thing about recycling is that they don’t have to be for recycling to work. All they have to do is throw their trash away into slightly different containers. A lot of things can get people to do that. If an environmental message doesn’t motivate them what will?

Pride and targeted competition

This is an area where dash-boarding really becomes valuable. Can you appeal to someone’s sense of campus pride or building pride if you cannot reach them through other messages? Whether it is an inter-hall comparison or an inter-school one, tapping into this competition can motivate different groups of people. Knowing how a rival school or rival dorm is doing at recycling can be very useful. I don’t care what rivalry you are looking at. It could be on-campus residence hall rivalries between East Hall and West Hall, sports rivalries like UNC-Duke, or rivalries that have both a sports and academic component like Harvard-Yale or Amherst-Williams. There are some rivalries so strong that people want to beat their rival at anything from football to tiddlywinks. Use that motivation to your advantage to improve your recycling program.

Cultural based messaging

Are there sections of campus and portions of the campus community who are missing your recycling message because your message is targeted to a different ethnic group? For example, in your graduate student/married student housing areas you may have a number of international families. The member of the household who is here as a graduate student may speak/read English well, but his or her family members might not. Working with the housing staff in the graduate/married student housing areas may allow you to identify the most prevalent languages spoken by graduate student families and translate your posters accordingly. And just the fact that you took the time to identify their needs might win you some significant support among those families. You may also want to really look at your message. Are the cultures that you are trying to reach going to be in any way affected by your message? I saw a fascinating presentation by a longtime colleague Keefe Harrison a couple years ago regarding community based social marketing. I don’t want to do it an injustice by trying to sum it all up in just a sentence, but it was fascinating to see how everything from a “traditional” recycling message was wrong for reaching certain communities. Everything was wrong from the traditional nature scenes, to the traditional green and blue color schemes. Those traditional message elements had virtually no positive impact in certain communities. Having folks from those communities help to design the message led to very different but much more effective results in that community. A little bit of targeted outreach and a few minor changes to your message and you might be amazed at the results.

Piggy backing your message

You don’t always have to do all of the heavy lifting. Partner with people who have a seemingly different message to send your message to a whole new group of people. Find your angle. Is another group talking about hunger? If so, it might be a good time for you to talk about ways to reduce food waste on campus or compost on campus. Is another group protesting and raising awareness about increases in student fees? If so, it might be a good time to look at messages that show how many students’ tuition go just to pay your school’s landfill bill. Is someone raising awareness about the need for jobs? If so, look to some of the various “jobs through recycling” publications that show how many more jobs are created through recycling than through landfilling. There are a lot of possibilities to re-target your message to people who might not be motivated by more traditional environmental and sustainability messaging.

A picture is worth a thousand words

It may be cliché, but a picture really is worth a thousand words. Incorporate pictures into your signs, labels, and promotional brochures wherever you can. It will convey your message far more effectively than words alone.

Take a look at an average college campus. Between words in a textbook, words in a paper/thesis, words in all the flyers and brochures, there are a lot of words. So much so, that words become “background noise” and are not paid attention to. Don’t let that happen with your recycling information.

Pictures are also critical to help reach members of the campus community for whom English is not their first language. They may be able to speak and read English, but it might be just enough of a struggle that it takes them a few extra moments to do so. The problem is that with trash and recycling bins, you typically only have a few seconds until someone puts something in the wrong bin.

Regardless of whether you are dealing with text fatigue or language barriers, having a picture conveys your message within the window of opportunity that you have in a way that words alone cannot.

Who are you trying to reach with your message? Have you targeted your message to all the different sections of campus? Or are you just standing in a field, scattering your message in all directions and hoping that it hits something? If the latter, do you have the budget and administrative support to keep doing that, or will you eventually have to have something to show for that effort?

Read Part 1 “Everything I need to know I learned from.. where?”

Read Part 2 “Understanding Why”