Student Joanna Ng recycles a water bottle at the Student Union, Monday, March 30, 2015. (DM Photo | Marlee Crawford)
The Ole Miss Recycles program is a collaborative effort between various organizations on campus and the city of Oxford.
According to Amberlyn Liles, director of Oxford Sanitation and Recycling, the university averages anywhere from 16,000 to 60,000 pounds in recyclables each month. She said some months, namely May and December, are “heavier” than others because of the number of students leaving the university who may be recycling items they don’t plan to take with them.
All of the money that comes from the recyclable materials does not come back to the university, however; it goes straight into the Oxford community.
Currently, the price per ton of recyclables in Oxford is about $100. This means that on average, the university helps the city of Oxford generate between $800 and $3,000 per month. In addition to that, the city pays a $36 tipping fee every time they dump one ton of solid waste into the landfill. The money that is saved from recycling is put into the city’s General Fund, which funds most of the departments within the city.
Dumpsters for non-recyclable solid waste are found at nearly every turn on campus, behind residence halls and academic buildings, but finding a recyclable-specific dumpster on campus is rare. Ole Miss students who work on campus and are more familiar with the ins-and-outs of the university are at a loss as to where the recyclables go once they are emptied from their respective bins.
“I am not entirely sure where the recyclables go,” said Summer Wigley, community assistant for Crosby Hall. “I know the bin will be full one day and empty the next.”
Ole Miss housing handles the recycling from residence halls. The employees of custodial contractor Sodexo dispose of the recyclable materials near the Sodexo office, a small building located at the back of the Kincannon parking lot.
A custodial worker for Sodexo in Crosby Hall, Vaterious Polk, explained that recyclables from the trash room in that residence hall are taken to a specific dumpster that is a bit of a distance away from Crosby.
A different crew handles game day and special event recycling. Since these events are outdoors, the Landscaping Department handles the disposal of those materials. Instead of being taken to the physical plant on campus, the recyclables handled by the Landscaping Department are taken directly to the Oxford Recycling Facility, where they are sorted and transported elsewhere.
The collection and disposal of recyclables for the academic buildings is a little more complicated than that of the residence halls and outdoors. At night, custodial staff from the physical plant collect the recyclables from academic buildings; this includes buildings with classrooms as well as buildings that are just there to serve the students, like the library and the student union.
Once the materials are collected, they are set outside the buildings and another team of physical plant employees picks them up. Plastic and aluminum are taken to recyclable-specific dumpsters either behind Fulton Chapel or the football stadium. From there, the materials are collected by Oxford Recycling and taken to their facilities.
Paper is handled differently.
According to Assistant Director of the Office of Sustainability Anne McCauley, because the university collects such high volumes of paper and cardboard, those materials are taken directly to the physical plant on campus where they are deposited into an extra large covered bin. This bin is so large that the university hires a third party to haul it to the Oxford Recycling Center because they do not have a truck big enough to transport the bin.
“(Recyclables from Ole Miss) have been anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the total volume that Oxford handles,” McCauley said.
