Cornell Campus Sustainability Office | April 22, 2018

Recyclemania, the nationwide 8-week long waste diversion and minimization competition concluded on March 31st 2018, and since then the R5 team here at Cornell has been hard at work to consolidate all of the data collected and provide us with a comparison between this year and previous years.

Successes:

• Between 2017 and 2018 Cornell decreased landfill usage by 285,940 pounds

• That is a reduction of about 20 pounds per student during the time of Recyclemania

• At the same time, we have increased our compost collection by 29,067 pounds of organic material. The change in composting indicates members of the Cornell community are diverting more organic materials from the landfill. 

Room for Improvement:

• Recycling efforts lagged - by a 113,671-pound decrease since 2017.

• A portion of the decrease in recycling may be due to an increase in the usage of reusable materials (water bottles, travel mugs, utensils, etc.).

Our landfill usage has decreased, it is possible that we produced less recyclables as a whole this year, which means we have greatly minimized the amount of waste we produced since last year.

By Elena Petkova '20, R5 Student Coordinator