Yale Is ‘Trashier’ Than Harvard

Crimson readers have been throwing their copies of the paper into the right place, the recycling bin—no doubt after reading them thoroughly—according to the results of the sixth annual Recyclemania competition. Harvard placed first out of 62 colleges in the contest’s paper recycling category.

Residents within our ivied walls each recycled 36.41 pounds of paper on average. And overall, the University had a per capita recycling mass of 40.82 pounds, putting Harvard in seventh place in the “Per Capita Classic” part of the competition.

“It’s the best we’ve ever done in proportion to the number of contestants,” Robert Gogan, supervisor of waste management and spearhead of the Recyclemania campaign here, said of the “Per Capita Classic” results, comparing last year’s eighth place out of 48 colleges to this year’s seventh out of 87.

“We were pleased to see that we beat Yale, and quite convincingly,” he said. The Bulldogs placed a distant 38th in that category.

The only other Ivy League school in the top 20 for per capita recycling was Princeton, at number nine. First place went to Oregon State University with 91.35 pounds, almost double Harvard’s total.

But in the waste minimization category Harvard was swept to the bottom of the league, coming 41st out of the 43 entrants in that category with 191.11 pounds of waste generated per person. That cut the University’s ranking in the overall “Grand Champion” category, which combines waste generation and per capita recycling standings, to 20th. Harvard residents recycled 26.72 percent of their waste, in comparison to the 50.9 percent by the first-place-holder, Cal State San Marcos.

“Harvard’s a very wealthy school and we buy a lot of stuff. Fortunately we did recover a lot of it to be recycled, which shows we have a good infrastructure,” Gogan said. “But the thing we have to work more on is buying more efficiently, buying the things we want, wasting less, using more.”

Faon M. O’Connor ’06, co-chair of the Environmental Action Committee, agreed that there was room for improvement, citing the large amounts of recyclable items that were found in dumpsters in the annual random rubbish sampling by the Resource Efficiency Program (REP).

“That particularly showed that we’re still throwing out a lot of materials that we need to be recycling,” she said.

Gogan said that it was not all student or even university waste, however, but that neighbours or construction sites will use the Harvard dumpsters, which “happens less often in a more remote university.”

“Research activities are inherently wasteful,” he also pointed out. “Many boxes come out of the labs every day and there’s no easy way to deal with that.”

Scot M. Miller ’07, a REP captain, added that smaller universities often have other aids to recycling efforts.

“We are at a slight disadvantage, as some smaller facilities like Middlebury have trash processing facilities where they can separate out the recyclables after people throw them away,” he said. “Our biggest challenge is convincing people to make the commitment to recycle.”

Gogan agreed, saying that they hoped to create the same “competitive spirit” in recycling efforts that there is in other aspects of Harvard life.

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.