Students shop for appliances, furniture and other dorm items at the first Cram & Scram resale in August. Earlier, at the end of the spring 2008 semester, 26 student volunteers led by Ashley Langer '09 had collected three tractor-trailers of reusable materials for resale, as well as more than 22 tons of other items that were recycled or donated to area agencies.
'Working from the top down and the bottom up,' students join forces
Student Involvement
By Phillip J. Hoying '09
ENVIRONMENTAL EFFORTS AND AWARENESS HAVE BEEN GROWING among students over the past few years — and unlike the flora at Hamilton, they have not been stunted by cold weather and seasonal snows. In fact, this year in the dead of winter, the annual student-planned winter carnival, FebFest, was themed "Walley Goes Green" in order to promote recycling and environmental consciousness. And FebFest is just one of many student-led greening projects. Thanks to several groups of students, Hamilton is home to an expanding number of activities and events that increase awareness about environmental issues, strive to change wasteful habits, and have a lasting impact on College policies.
Making recycling a habit
ONE GROUP, THE RECYCLING TASK FORCE, HAS HAD AN INCREASINGLY visible presence on campus. With nearly 350 brightly colored recycling stations in place, the group intends to make it easy for students and employees alike to incorporate recycling into their daily habits. For Jen Kleindienst '09, coordinator of the RTF, the key is to clearly convey the details of what can be recycled. "Hamilton is both lucky and unlucky, because Oneida and Herkimer counties recycle more types of items than most other places," she says. "It's good in terms of our recycling abilities, but it also means that it's more complicated because we have to tell people you can recycle this, but not that."
While many students regularly recycle at home, others have never had the opportunity, coming from states that do not recycle. Terry Hawkridge, who as Hamilton's assistant director of grounds, horticulture and Arboretum is the advisor to the task force, notes that "the ingrained values of recycling are either coming to the campus already or have to be made here. We're going to have to work on helping the student body sort their reuse items better." In order to help educate students, the RTF has focused on placing a simple explanatory poster at each station, maintaining an updated and thorough Web site, and working to put lids on every bin at every recycling station.
Seeing such lids — which are intended to decrease cross-contamination — in use at other colleges, Kleindienst believes they have already started to make a difference at Hamilton. She attributes the change to the psychological effect of seeing a slight barrier. "If people see a slot, they are less likely to think they can throw a cup in there, or if they see a small round hole, they less likely to throw garbage in," she says.
Other recent projects led by RTF include a "Can the Can" waste-reduction program that aims to reduce office waste by introducing smaller waste baskets; a sneaker reuse station; a plastic bag recycling station; a book drive (to prevent them from ending up in a landfill); the installation of solar trash compactors; participation in the national RecycleMania effort; and the group's largest event, Ham Cram & Scram. A massive reuse project initiated in May 2008, Cram & Scram is RTF's response to the year-end ballooning of on-campus waste, which averages 60-70 tons per month but spikes to 140 tons in a typical May, when students abandon thousands of items large and small as they pack up to leave campus for the summer.
Collecting and sorting such items, last May's Cram & Scram kept more than 40 tons of usable products out of the local landfill. Three tractor-trailers of dorm items — everything from futons and refrigerators to microwaves and lamps — were stored over the summer, then sold to incoming students in August to help offset costs of the program and provide Hamilton students with affordable furnishings. While it cost Hamilton about $2,000 to initiate the program, Hawkridge believes Cram & Scram will grow to be self-sufficient — and in the meantime, "not sending 40 tons to a landfill makes a lot of green sense to me." A "mini" version of Cram & Scram was held at the end of the fall semester.
