Tip of the Week: Recycling

You use it when you barbecue, cover your jars with it and wrap your leftovers in it. Aluminum foil is a great product that can accomplish various tasks. It also can go in your recycling! Be sure to rinse your foil and flatten it before disposing it into your recycling bin. Employees who sort our city's recycling are trained to throw away crumpled up foil, assuming it may contain food or other materials in it.

SPU Composting Program

Exciting things are happening on campus! This year SPU has incorporated a pilot composting program for students living in campus apartments. At the beginning of this quarter, each apartment was granted a their own personal compost bin along with a sample of compostable bags. The individual bins can be emptied into a larger food/yard waste collection bin next to each building's exterior garbage and recycle bins. This composting program is a significant step in SPU's continual commitment to waste reduction and supporting a sustainable campus. Last year's waste audit was a reflection of the amount of materials that campus apartment residents will be able to divert from the landfill by properly recycling and composting.

What Are We Throwing Away?

Over the past few weeks, the sustainability staff has carried out a waste audit to determine how much of the waste from campus apartments could in the future be diverted away from landfills. While rifling through garbage wasn't exactly pleasant, the results found were pretty staggering: over the course of the audit, a full 80% of waste from campus apartments was material that could either be recycled or composted. That means only 20% of the garbage was actually waste!

Graduation Attire Made of Recycled Plastic Bottles

For the 2011 graduating class, commencement is beginning to appear on the horizon. With just a quarter and a half to go, it is almost time to start preparing for the big event. Amidst all of the anticipation surrounding this milestone, here's some news that will make you even more excited about graduating: participating in this year's commencement will help save the planet.

That's right - all caps and gowns worn by this year's graduating class will be made from 100% post-consumer recycled bottles. An average of twenty-three plastic bottles will go into the making of each cap and gown.

A Plastic Ocean

In parts of the "Pacific Garbage Patch" there is more plastic than plankton, the crucial food source for fish and marine mammals.

Plastic.  It seems like just about everything we use is made of some type of plastic.  230 million tons of plastic are consumed worldwide every year.  Unfortunately, more than 90% of plastics are not recycled.  And since plastic does not biodegrade, the waste sticks around for hundreds, even thousands, of years.  This has resulted in a major ecological problem in the world's oceans.  Pollution, along with other human action like overfishing, has put the world's oceans in serious trouble.