PSU Recycles! receives another year of funding

Just days after learning that the program would no longer be funded by the Facilities and Planning department, Portland State’s recycling coalition, PSU Recycles!, received word that it would be provided for by the department’s budget office for one more year.

This short-term solution came last Thursday from John Mclean, associate director of Finance & Business Services within Facilities and Planning. In order to divert some expenses from the program, many of its functions are being handed over to Aramark, the multinational company that already provides food and custodial services for PSU.

To further its budget woes, PSU Recycles! will not receive any funding from the Student Fee Committee next year, though it has been partly funded through student fees since 2005.

PSU Recycles! is a team of recycling specialists who work to support sustainability on campus through a wide range of initiatives and services. According to Christel Eichner, resource management coordinator for the program, the team is currently composed of five employees and multiple volunteers who perform physical duties such as collecting compost in offices, managing reusable material flows on campus through the “ReUse Room” in Smith Memorial Student Union, setting up composting at catered events on campus, providing waste collection during move-in and move-out and creating and posting signage around campus.

The team also makes it possible to recycle materials that are not collected by Aramark, such as ink cartridges, Styrofoam, batteries and hard plastics.

In addition, the team, most of whom work part-time, implements many of the items from PSU’s Climate Action Plan and suggestions from student research. They also track material flow data and conduct educational campaigns.

“The disadvantage of having a contractor like Aramark collect recycling on campus is that it puts people in these jobs who are trained to just switch out a bag,” Eichner said.

Beginning in April, Aramark will handle the collection of recycling in all academic buildings.

“The feedback loops needed for me to make improvements in campus recycling is lost when the services are contracted out,” she said, referring to the amount of analysis conducted by the PSU Recycles! team about what is being tossed and what can be done to improve recycling rates on campus.

PSU Recycles! employees are trained to hand-separate recycling from the waste stream, reducing the amount of recyclable materials sent to material recovery facilities. The recovery of these materials in turn contributes to recycling reclamation revenue, which totaled about $30,000 last year.

“Though not ideal for a university to contract out recycling services, what’s worse is for the university to lose out on all the other services that our program provides and has worked diligently to expand through tight budget constraints and a small staff,” Eichner said.

With the reduction of collection responsibility under the new budget, the program will be able to hire six new recycling specialists and retain all other positions which include Eichner’s position, a work study graphic designer, student recruitment coordinator, graduate assistant, outreach coordinator and five recycling specialists.

“PSU Recycles! employees are genuinely interested in problem solving recycling issues and when services are kept in-house, the feedback is more direct and improvements can be made more rapidly,” Eichner said.

This unity will no longer exist when Aramark takes over waste management across campus, according to Eichner.

PSU Recycles! will continue to collect recyclables in the Academic and Student Recreation Center, Fourth Avenue Building, the Native American Student and Community Center, the Science and Education Center, University Center Building and all student housing.

PSU Recycles! began as a nonprofit student group in the 1970s and has been a constant presence on campus ever since. According to the program website, the team helped divert 527 tons of paper, plastic and metal in 2009. ?