New initiatives to increase student participation in on-campus recycling were announced at the Residence Hall Association’s first meeting Wednesday.
RHA Recycling will resume its program Sept. 18.
Among renewed efforts to promote student participation in recycling, Jennifer Chandonnet, RHA’s recycling director, said the most notable initiative is the Inkjet Cartridge Recycling Program.
Chandonnet said the program would involve students bringing their used inkjet printer cartridges to residence hall front desks. The cartridges will then be deposited into envelopes and mailed to AAA Environmental, Inc., a company that cleans the cartridges.
The company will send the cartridges to various companies that refill them, where they will then be resold, Chandonnet said.
RHA would get $1 back for every recycled inkjet cartridge, which would be used to help strengthen its recycling program.
“Since freshmen are required to have computers this year, we figured they would also have printers,” Chandonnet said. “By the end of the year, their printer cartridges would have run out, and there would be no need to waste them by throwing them away.”
Along with the cartridge project, the RHA recycling program will also have pizza nights for students and host a campus wide cleanup Nov. 15, she said.
Michelle Ginther, a coordinator for the recycling program, said she’s ready to do all she can to ensure greater student participation in recycling this year.
“If the recycling budget is approved, we will be making lots of posters about recycling and really put an emphasis on advertising,” she said. “We want students to know that there’s a recycling room with bins in each hall, and we’re going to go door to door to collect recyclable materials. If more people help, it will take less time.”
Ginther said students should recycle for the sake of our future.
“The environment is going downhill,” she said. “If we don’t make an effort to preserve our environment today, we won’t live a good healthy life tomorrow. Many of my friends think recycling isn’t important, but it’ll help them be better off health wise in the future.”
Chandonnet said students have very few appliances that can’t be recycled, and more than 80 percent of MSU’s garbage is recyclable. She said college students can make a difference.
“Students use 53 million notebooks every year, and if 10 percent of these books were recycled, we would save 45,000 trees yearly,” she said.
