How did Ithaca do in week two? Not bad, but there's still a lot of room for improvement!
We are competing in four categories of Recyclemania: Grand Champion, Per Capita Classic, Waste Minimization, and Gorilla Prize.
Grand Champion measures our overall recycling rate. Ours came out to be 35.47 percent this week, up from 31.23 percent in 2007. This is great!
However, the top school overall has a recycling rate of 50 percent, and they are up from 40 percent last year. Fifty percent is not too hard for us to achieve! All of the resources are available to us -- we just need to put in more effort to use the recycling bins on campus.
Per Capita Classic measures the pounds of recyclables produced per person on campus. The average person on campus produced 1.99 pounds of recyclables in week two, down from 2.57 pounds in 2007. However, since our recycling rate went up, this is actually showing that we are producing less waste. This is also good news!
Waste Minimization is about who can generate the lowest amount of total waste per capita, which includes both trash and recycling. We are down to 5.6 pounds per person in week two, from 8.15 pounds per person at this time last year. But many schools are doing better than this; for example, Suffolk University in Boston came in with 4.7 pounds per person. Remember, if you are spotted with your reusable mug by a member of REMP, you receive a coupon for a free coffee! We all can produce less waste if we make a conscious effort.
And the final category is the Gorilla Prize, which simply measures each college's cumulative pounds of recyclables. As you might have guessed, top finishers in this category tend to be the schools with the greatest populations. However, it is interesting just to see exactly how many pounds of recyclables Ithaca College generates in one week. For week two, we generated a whopping 15,600 pounds of recyclables. Imagine if that went into a landfill every week!
To see complete results for Ithaca College and all of the competing universities, you can visit www.recyclemania.org and check out the links for both "Results" and "Participating Schools."
