We all know the answer to that question is yes! Tufts is definitely better than Harvard and now we even have the cold, hard facts to back that up (at least in the realm of recycling). From where, you ask? The results for the first three weeks of Recycle Mania have come in! What's that? You don't know what Recycle Mania is? Well, some of you may have noticed the huge, brightly colored scoreboards hanging all over campus. But in case you missed them (or didn't bother to stop and read them), Recycle Mania is a friendly, 10-week competition held each year between colleges and universities all over the country to see which school is recycling the most. It started on Jan. 23, and I hate to break the news to you guys, but our results for the first three weeks have not been too good.
There are many divisions in which a school can compete (and Tufts participates in several), but at Tufts Recycles we really keep track of the results from the most popular two. These are the "Grand Champion" division, which is won by the school that recycles the most in relation to the amount of trash it produces, and the "Per-Capita" division, which measures the amount of recycling produced per person. Out of 157 schools in the Grand Champion division, Tufts was hovering around 40th place for the first two weeks, and though we did climb up to 23rd during week three, we're still far from the top ten schools. The news is no better in the Per-Capita division. In the first week, we were ranked 16th out of 247, but in the second week we dropped down to No. 23, and now we're at No. 22. Ouch.
We know that it's only a friendly competition, but really, this is pretty shameful. The good news is that we're still beating Harvard, as mentioned above (number 80 in the Grand Champion division), as well as Boston University, Boston College and most other Boston-area schools. But we're currently being beaten by Kalamazoo College, Stanford, Connecticut College and Princeton, to name a few. We all know how environmentally conscious Tufts is supposed to be; we have recycling bins everywhere. Recycling should be second-nature here. We may be lacking some of the crazy eco-friendly infrastructure of a few of the schools we're competing against that allow them to do things like generate almost no waste (California State University, we know of your tricks!), but we definitely have the capacity to do better.
Some of my recycling colleagues think that there may have been some monkey business with the reporting from the other schools during the first few weeks (perhaps they only get their trash picked up every three weeks, enabling them to inflate their initial recycling scores?), but that is actually rather irrelevant because the competition is illuminating something more. Next time you're passing one of our excessively colorful Recycle Mania scoreboards, check out the graph in the lower left corner. It shows the tons of trash that our Medford/Somerville campus produces in a week compared to the amount of recycling, and so far, we consistently produce twice as much trash as recycling. It's pretty scary to look at.
Of course there are actually some things that can't be recycled (like used tissues, those Styrofoam cups that you get from Hodgdon, your old socks that have too many holes in them to keep wearing), but there are way more things that can be recycled that students consistently throw away (Solo cups, juice/milk cartons, those cardboard things that go around hot drinks) because they don't know they can be recycled. Then there is a whole category of things that people know can be recycled but that suffer from the unfortunate positioning of the user nearer to a trash can than a recycling bin when he/she finishes with them. This includes aluminum cans, plastic bottles, newspapers and all those fliers that fall off the walls in the wind tunnel. These things don't get recycled because people think it's too much trouble to recycle them. All these non-recycled items together are bringing our recycling rate down and harming the environment.
Something I heard recently in relation to Tufts' environmental tendencies is that if one is grading on a curve, Tufts does really well. We are well ahead of the environmental curve in general, just as all of you were probably well above the grading curve in your high schools. But we all knew that one person (or those 22 people) who were so annoyingly ahead of the curve that they beat you, even though you knew your stuff. These are the other schools that are beating us right now. But remember when you decided you wanted to do better and started climbing up that curve? We can do that. We actually are a very "green" school; we just sometimes get lazy. But with the way that being eco-friendly is becoming trendier lately, more schools are getting in on the green movement and the curve is rising, meaning we can't afford to be lazy. And anti-laziness starts with all of us: the students.
So I want to leave you with a few interesting things to think about. The first one is that disposing of recycling costs Tufts about half as much as disposing of trash. So every time we put something recyclable in the trash can, we are raising our tuition by a fraction (as if it's not high enough already, right?). The second thing is that while we have been making little progress in the competition, Harvard has been catching up. And like I said, we all know we're better than Harvard. We can't let them get ahead of us. So, with those two things in mind, next time you're holding something and thinking "I know I could recycle this, but the recycling bin is all the way over there [6 steps away]", remember this is Recycle Mania. Have a little school spirit or environmental spirit and just recycle it! We got off to a slow start, but we're going to rock this thing.
--
Christina Kay is a sophomore majoring in peace and justice studies. She is a recycling intern at Tufts Recycles.
