more thoughts on recycling (by alex)

(posted on behalf of alex)

I have been working with the recycling group to improve the Oxy’s recycling program. I’m sure you have read my other group members posts so I will try not to be too repetitive, but we can’t emphasize enough how regressive the system is here. The company that we have now, SoCal Recycling, exists as a for-profit company. Oxy uses them because their services are free. We throw things into the bin, they pick them up and sell them back for money. We do this because it is the easiest and cheapest solution. But, as we tend to see when it comes to environmental issues, that mentality is not quite appropriate. Because Oxy has taken no steps to educate us, the students, on their recycling policy, we continue to recycle the way we do at home, which at least where I’m from is just throwing everything into one bin and letting the company take care of it. Because most of us continue to do this at Oxy, SoCal is considering dropping us because it so much of what we attempt to recycle is to them only considered trash.
It has been my job to contact outside companies. When I spoke to SCR, they told me that they only take CRVs (and on a side note offered to pick up out paper recycling as long as we had a machine that would bale it. Lol). I spoke to the city’s official recycling company and they weren’t very helpful. Apparently LA has the best recycling program in the country, but the woman I talked to wasn’t sure if they could pick ours up or how much it would cost. They then sent us a list of other companies to look at without giving us a quote.
As you can see changing the recycling policy at Oxy is very challenging. While we have gotten the ball rolling, I plan to continue this project next semester and I hope some of you will join us. In the meantime, get the word out to your friends while we are getting the signs up. Hopefully when people find out how ridiculous it is they will start to voice their discontent.