In 1989, broadcast television behemoth Ted Turner created Captain Planet, a cartoon character whose mission was to make the world eco-friendly by influencing young people with his mantra, “The power is yours!” Twenty years later, the cartoon is still as cheesy as ever. But the mantra oddly applies to Georgetown’s undergraduate population when it comes to the most basic eco-friendly action: recycling.
Recently, Recyclemania—a nationwide competition that measures the recycling rates of many colleges and universities throughout the country—released the results of its ten-week contest. Georgetown first participated in 2007, but only in the corrugated cardboard competition. For the past two years, the University has participated in the full recycling contest. The schools are judged by their recycling rates, which indicate the amount of their waste generation, waste minimization, and recycling by pounds of cardboard, paper, bottles, and cans. Georgetown’s numbers improved in about every category this year, including the two major categories that Alec Cooley, Recyclemania Program Manager, noted: recycling rate as a percentage of overall waste generation and waste minimization.
The numbers may sound like Georgetown is making a sound effort in recycling its waste, but Georgetown’s student body is not making a full effort. At this past weekend’s Relay for Life, Jonathon Cohn (COL ’10) and a friend tried to organize ways for students to recycle instead of just throwing all their waste in the trash. When Cohn tried to sort out the materials after Relay was over, there was a problem. “The recycling bins were so highly contaminated that it wasn’t even worthwhile to do anything with them,” Cohn explained.
Georgetown students didn’t feel the need to throw their waste in the correct receptacles, a problem that seems to have become a habit throughout the entire student body. Our average per capita recycling rate during the Recyclemania contest was only 0.98 pounds per week. The University doesn’t help by frequently failing to place recycling bins next to trashcans—like in ICC classrooms and the isolated gold trash bins in the Leavey Center—but the student body’s utter negligence is ultimately indicative of environmental laziness.
We, as students, need to make a more conscious effort to recycle. But even if some trash cans and recycling bins aren’t adjacent, the inconvenience of looking for a recycling bin is not worth the environmental harm created by needless waste. Like the Captain said, the power is yours.
