Have you ever heard rumors that recycling never makes it to the facility where it belongs? I know that it can be easy to get confused or lost in all of the myths and rumors you may hear about sustainability. This is especially true if you’ve never read, studied, or learned about it from someone who is directly involved. So, I am going to bust a few myths for you!
The first myth is that recycling never actually gets recycled. I’m slightly curious about this- if you don’t think that recycling gets recycled, where does it go? Here’s the thing: recycling makes it to the recycling plant. Waste/recycling haulers come to North Central College regularly to haul away the recycling, trash, and compost. However, if you put the incorrect thing in the recycling, it ruins the whole batch. That’s why it’s really important to read the “recycle right!” posters that can be found around campus, and follow the pictures on the recycling bins in the cage. When in doubt, unfortunately it is better to throw things in the trash than risk spoiling an entire batch of recycling.
Things you can’t recycle include: Papa Johns’ plates (because of the plastic liner) , styrofoam, anything with a lot of food on it, and liquids. Again, refer to the signs around campus for a more detailed frame of reference.
The second myth is that the College doesn’t have enough space for the compost that we produce. This is a misconception. North Central College puts its compost in a dumpster behind White Activities Center. Then an outside hauler takes it to a facility where it is composted and reused as soil. This soil material is known as “humus” and is one of the richest forms of fertilizer, because of the high level of organic content. It is rich in nitrogen and other nutrients.
The final myth I would like to address is that it takes more time and energy to properly transport and sort recycling at a facility that it is worth in recycled materials. This is untrue. At North Central College, we use single stream recycling, which means that all of the materials you recycle-glass, aluminum, paper, and plastic-all go to the same facility and are thrown into the same can. At the recycling facility, they are sorted by machine to be recycled. Although these machines do use energy, in the long run it is more efficient to do it this way than to haul away several different bins for recycling. People also tend to recycle more when they do not need to put in the effort to sort their recyclables. Imagine if NCC had extra recycling bins in addition to the landfill and compost bins!
In short, there’s a lot of information out there about sustainability and how effective the measures we take are. It can be hard to sort fact from fiction. In the end however, some effort is better than none. We are getting closer to solutions every day, but when everyone does at least something, we will reach sustainable solutions much faster.
