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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Rene Garcia (from the left) gets ready to hurl a
bag of discarded white paper into UCLA’s dump, nicknamed the
Blue Goose, located off DeNeve Drive. He and his
coworkers Raul Mejia and Sam Nunez are part of the Facilities Management
team that helps UCLA recycle about 306 tons of the stuff a year. |
all that trash
Recycling turns blue 'n' gold green
BY JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff
At 7:30 in the morning, a time of day when many students in the residence
halls just up the hill are still snoozing, Sam Nunez and Greg Frank are
giving two-and-a-half tons of discarded white paper the heave-ho. The
pair — staffers with the Facilities Management Department —
stand in the back of their flatbed truck parked in the campus dump nicknamed
the Blue Goose, heaving bags of crumpled, torn and shredded white paper
into a huge recycling dumpster. The hundreds of clear plastic bags shimmer
in the early sun.
Then Nunez and Frank rev up the engine and start all over again, making
their rounds among the 600 or so white-paper recycling containers planted
from one end of campus to the other, from offices to classrooms to research
labs to hospital floors. By 3:30 p.m., the back of their truck will again
be piled high. The job’s a tough one — in a single day the
pair will cover several miles on foot and put in hours of heavy lifting
— but “it’s really important,” Nunez asserted.
“We’re running out of forests.”
With a daily population of more than 60,000 people, the campus produces
about as much solid waste as a small city.
“That’s waste from more than 60,000 people working, studying,
eating, drinking, dropping and spilling on campus daily,” said E.J.
Kirby, manager of campus maintenance, who directly oversees UCLA’s
recycling program.
But through Herculean efforts by its employees and masterful coordination,
the campus manages to recycle more than half of what it generates in waste.
Consider this: Over the course of a year, UCLA sends some 306 tons of
discarded white paper to a recycler instead of to a landfill. Yet white-paper
recycling constitutes only a small part of UCLA’s campaign, begun
in 1990, to recycle campus waste to conserve resources and reduce environmental
pollution.
UCLA churns out about 51 tons of solid waste every day, almost 19,000
tons every year. And while not all of it can be recycled, a huge portion
is. Some 304 tons a year of cardboard and corrugated board, most of it
from packaged goods received by the medical center, are recycled. There’s
also an annual 6,500 tons of mixed paper — including many of the
15,000 Daily Bruins that hit the campus every weekday — that is
collected in recycling bins around campus. And in buildings identified
as significant sources of paper waste, Facilities Management custodians
further trawl for mixed paper by performing a “negative sort”
of waste from trash cans and three-cubic-yard bins on building loading
docks.
“We’re recycling at about 23% of our waste stream,”
said Jack Powazek, assistant vice chancellor of Facilities Management
and Environment, Health and Safety. “We’re working very, very
hard. This is an effort that requires an infrastructure that is quite
extensive.”
Contrary to popular belief, recycling is not a money-making venture.
While white paper brings the university some financial return, most aspects
of recycling cost money, from equipment to labor to outside recycling
vendors.
It took a $30,000 grant from the California State Department of Conservation
to enable the  campus
to start collecting the thousands of plastic, glass and aluminum
beverage containers discarded on campus every day. The program started
three years ago with 12 three-section recycling “clusters”
and has since expanded to 60 across the campus.
Also adding to campus waste are old desks, chairs, file cabinets and
other office and classroom furnishings, some 170 tons of which are hauled
over the course of a year to a campus waste yard, where they are disassembled
into their metal and wood parts for pickup by recyclers. Another 60 tons
of miscellaneous wood — pallets and other items — are collected
from campus loading docks and recycled.
A growing portion of campus waste is electronic waste, from old computers
to fluorescent light tubes. These present a challenge because they require
special treatment due to their classification as hazardous materials.
Computer monitors, which contain lead, must be disassembled. Fluorescent
tubes, of which the campus has about a half-million, contain mercury.
When the tubes burn out, maintenance workers collect them and send them
to a recycler who takes the tubes apart, removes the mercury and recycles
it and other components.
Also recycled is waste from the campus’ abundant construction
projects: Some 1.5 million pounds of broken-up roadways, brick and concrete
are pulverized and reused as roadbase for California’s state highways.
Meanwhile, campus landscaping generates 1.7 million pounds of green
waste. Most of this, however, never leaves campus. Trimmed tree branches
are turned into wood chips that are reused as ground cover or mulch. And
the campus’ grass mowers are specially designed to cut the grass
and then chew it into minute fragments that are automatically scattered
on the lawns to be absorbed as nutrients while also serving as a natural
insulator, reducing water evaporation and, ultimately, campus water usage.
In addition to recycled waste, there’s what Kirby calls “rock-bottom
trash” — from food waste to mixed wastes that would prove
too costly to sort. An annual 12 million pounds of this trash —
an additional 32% of UCLA’s waste stream — is shipped to a
waste-energy plant in the City of Commerce. It is “an environmentally
clean plant that not only does not create pollution,” Powazek pointed
out, but which, in the process of incinerating UCLA’s trash, produces
electrical power for use in Commerce and neighboring municipalities. “Even
the ash byproduct of the incineration process, which comes to some 15%
to 20% of the original weight of the waste, is reused,” Powazek
noted. When water is added to this substance, it can be turned into a
solid form that is shaped into blocks and used in building roads.
UCLA’s recycling and waste-to-energy efforts add up to 53% of
UCLA’s waste stream — 28 tons of waste diverted from landfills
every day, 10,280 tons every year — nearly equivalent to the total
weight of 24 fully loaded 747 jetliners.
“In difficult budgetary times it would be easy to wipe out these
programs as a way of saving money,” said Powazek. “But recycling
is worthwhile in terms of environmental impact on UCLA, on the L.A. basin
and Southern California. We’re very committed.”
Added Kirby: “It’s the right thing to do. We’re dealing
with our future.” |
