The Office of Sustainability recently launched Recyclemania 2016, an eight-week long national campaign that aims to promote recycling and other sustainable practices to students at campuses across the United States and Canada.

The campaign takes weekly benchmarks of the amount of material recycled, as well as deposited in trash cans across campus. With this information, UH will be ranked among all other participating universities and will then use the numbers to “rally their campus to reduce and recycle more” according to the Office of Sustainability’s Recyclemania webpage.

This will be UH’s second year participating in the national campaign. Sarah Kelly, sustainability manager at the Office of Sustainability, said that UH is hoping to reach at least a 25 percent recycling rate.

“RecycleMania is a great way to get the campus involved in recycling and waste minimization on campus,” Kelly said. “By participating in the two-month competition, we’re able to benchmark against other institutions, educate our campus about the importance of waste reduction and recycling and improve our waste minimization and recycling efforts on campus.”

Recyclemania will consist of four events, the first of which kicked off Feb. 11. The second event included a sustainability meetup and was held Wednesday in the Health and Biomedical Sciences Building.

The meetup featured waste and recycling documentary videos and included a group discussion.

“Even small things can have a really big impact. If you decide you’re going to eat (something), or use it for something else, or just throw it away, it can make a big difference,” math and physics junior Nikhil Pandya, who attended the meetup Wednesday, said. “It’s called the Bystander Effect – anyone can think ‘Oh, you know, someone else will handle it’, but if everyone has that mentality, you get six garbage islands.”

The second sustainability meetup is scheduled for March 8 and will feature an expert panel.

“The final event will be an electronics recycling drive for students, faculty, staff and alumni to recycle their personal electronics” Kelly said.

The drive is scheduled for 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. April 1 in the Student Center Circle Drive.

Clancy Nelson, who is leading data collection for Recyclemania, said she hopes students will participate in the events and learn how they can help save the planet.

“The ocean processes about half of all carbon dioxide emissions and produces about half of the oxygen that we breathe while land-based environments receive most of our concern,” Nelson said. “We must keep our oceans healthy, and one way that we can all pitch in is by reducing, reusing and recycling plastics. We may not live in the ocean, but we sure can’t live without it.”

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“UH joins national sustainability campaign with Recyclemania” was originally posted on The Daily Cougar