The installation of seven new recycling clusters on campus is expected to be completed in the coming months.
As part of an ongoing effort to improve waste management and expand recycling programs on campus, UCLA Facilities Management will be installing recycling depositories in several strategic locations, said Phil Hampton, a UCLA spokesman.
“There are seven areas across campus that have been determined to be practical locations for new recycling clusters for the collection of glass, plastic bottles and cans,” he said. “Those clusters have been ordered from a vendor and are expected to be in place by the start of the calendar year.”
The specific locations of the proposed depositories are yet to be released.
Hoping to improve the state of waste management on campus, student groups collaborated with members of the Student Welfare Commission to advocate for a greater availability of recycling depositories around campus last year.
Representatives from Environmental Bruins along with the Student Welfare Commission’s recycling committee approached Facilities Management officials, asking that recycling clusters be installed at five locations on campus where the student groups had identified, through their own survey work, that no such containers existed, including the oft-traveled sidewalk on the north side of the intramural fields between the Hill and the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
To address the problem, students met with Facilities Management officials.
“We specified where we wanted each kind of bin,” said Heidi Winner, former co-president of Environmental Bruins. “We found that UCLA is really lacking in the plastic, aluminum and glass tripods. That’s mostly what we were pushing for.”
During the meeting, administrators discussed the specifics of the current recycling program, noting specific obstacles that the program has encountered in its development, Winner said.
Students said a frustrating hurdle has been resistance when negotiating with the officials about the new program.
“They had a lot of reasons why they didn’t want to put out more bins,” said Caitlin Nunn, co-director of the Student Welfare Commission environmental awareness, recycling and terrestrial health program.
“Sometimes it is hard to work with Facilities; their office was pretty unwilling to work with us last year,” she added.
Funding shortcomings significant enough to preclude the hiring of adequate staff to maintain an operation of this size are perhaps the most significant hurdle that students and administrators have faced in their attempts to improve campus waste management.
The representatives from Facilities Management present at the meeting that took place during the previous academic year were receptive, but made no promises for plans to improve the campus recycling program, stating that budget limitations eliminated the possibility of assigning full-time staff members to the program, Winner said. Only recently have plans to follow through with the cluster installations become public.
Facilities Management officials were unavailable to comment.
Plans are now also being made to employ at least two additional student workers to collect the recyclables from these clusters and a new full-time recycling coordinator position has been created to help manage the program.
There are already problems with the existing 50 recycling clusters, Hampton said.
In the past, Facilities Management has reported that the recyclables inside the existing receptacles are often stolen.
“There is a value in recyclable materials,” said Hampton. “Like in any public location, you need to guard against people foraging for recyclable materials and keep them from taking them for their own purposes.”
UCLA General Services reported that between January and August of 2007 over 25 million pounds of waste were produced on campus, including nearly 2 million pounds of mixed paper and 6,000 pounds of bottles and cans.
“The current waste diversion is about 35 percent,” Hampton said, referring to the recycling of waste that would otherwise go to a landfill.
Hampton said administrators will continue to evaluate the state of recycling programs on campus.