At 7:30 in the morning, a time of day when many students in the residence halls just up the slope are still snoozing in bed, Sam Nunez and Greg Frank are giving two-and-a-half tons of discarded white paper the heave-ho. The pair — staff members with the Facilities Management Department — stand in the back of their flatbed truck parked in the campus dump nicknamed The Blue Goose, heaving bags of crumpled, torn and shredded white paper into a huge recycling bin. The hundreds of clear plastic bags shimmer in the early sun.
Then Nunez and Frank rev up the engine and start all over again, making their rounds among the 600 or so white-paper recycling containers planted from one end of campus to the other, from offices to classrooms to research labs to hospital wards. By 3:30 p.m., the back of their truck will again be piled high. The job is a tough one — in a single day the pair will cover several miles on foot and put in hours of heavy lifting — but “it’s really important,” Nunez asserts. “We’re running out of forests.”
Over the course of a year, UCLA sends some 306 tons of discarded white paper to a recycler instead of to a landfill. Yet white-paper recycling constitutes only a small part of UCLA’s campaign, begun in 1990, to recycle campus waste to conserve resources and reduce environmental pollution.
“We get hit with as much waste as a small city every day,” says E.J. Kirby, manager of campus maintenance, who oversees UCLA’s recycling program. “That’s waste from more than 60,000 people working, studying, eating, drinking, dropping and spilling on campus every day.”
UCLA churns out about 51 tons of solid waste every day, almost 19,000 tons every year. While not all of it can be recycled, a huge portion is. Some 304 tons a year of cardboard and corrugated board, most of it from packaged goods received by the medical center, is recycled. There’s also an annual 6,500 tons of mixed paper — including many of the 15,000 Daily Bruins that hit the campus every weekday — that is collected in recycling bins around campus. And in buildings identified as significant sources of paper waste, Facilities Management custodians further trawl for mixed paper by performing a “negative sort” of waste from trash cans and three-cubic-yard bins on building loading docks.
“We’re recycling at about 23 percent of our waste stream,” says Jack Powazek ’72, M.B.A. ’74, Ed.D. ’01, assistant vice chancellor of Facilities Management and Environment, Health & Safety. “We’re working very, very hard. This is an effort that requires an infrastructure that is quite extensive.”
Contrary to popular belief, recycling is not a money-making venture. While white paper brings the university some financial return, most aspects of recycling cost money, from equipment to labor to outside recycling vendors.
It took a $30,000 grant from the California State Department of Conservation to enable the campus to start collecting the thousands of plastic, glass and aluminum beverage containers discarded on campus every day. The program started three years ago with 12 three-section recycling “clusters” and has since expanded to 60 across the campus.
Also adding to campus waste are old desks, chairs, file cabinets and other office and classroom furnishings, some 170 tons of which are hauled over the course of a year to a campus waste yard, where they are disassembled into their metal and wood parts for pickup by recyclers. Another 60 tons of miscellaneous wood — pallets and other items — are collected from campus loading docks.
A growing portion of campus waste is electronic waste, from old computers to fluorescent light tubes. These present a challenge because they require special treatment due to their classification as hazardous materials. Computer monitors, which contain lead, must be disassembled. Fluorescent tubes, of which the campus has about a half-million, contain mercury. When the tubes burn out, maintenance workers collect them and they’re sent to a recycler who takes the tubes apart, removes the mercury and recycles it and other components.
Also recycled is waste produced by campus construction projects: Some 1.5 million pounds of broken-up roadways, brick and concrete are pulverized and sent out for reuse as roadbase in California’s state highways.
Meanwhile, campus landscaping generates 1.7 million pounds of green waste. Most of this, however, never leaves campus. Trimmed tree branches are turned into wood chips that are reused as ground cover or mulch. And the campus’ grass mowers are specially designed to cut the grass and then chew it into minute fragments that are automatically scattered on the lawns to be absorbed as nutrients while also serving as a natural insulator, reducing water evaporation and, ultimately, campus water usage.
In addition to recycled waste, there’s what Kirby calls “rock-bottom trash” — from food waste to mixed wastes that would prove too costly to sort. An annual 12 million pounds of this trash — an additional 32 percent of UCLA’s waste stream — is shipped to a waste-to-energy plant in the City of Commerce. It is “an environmentally clean plant that not only does not create pollution,” Powazek points out, but which, in the process of incinerating UCLA’s trash, produces electrical power for use in Commerce and neighboring municipalities. “Even the ash by-product of the incineration process, which comes to some 15 to 20 percent of the original weight of the waste, is reused,” Powazek notes. When water is added, it solidifies into a substance that can then be shaped into blocks and used in building roads.
UCLA’s recycling and waste-to-energy efforts add up to 53 percent of UCLA’s waste stream — 28 tons of waste diverted from landfills every day, 10,280 tons every year — about the weight of 24 fully loaded 747 jetliners.
“In difficult budgetary times it would be easy to wipe out these programs as a way of saving money,” Powazek says. “But recycling is worthwhile in terms of environmental impact on UCLA, on the L.A. basin and Southern California. We’re very committed.”
Says Kirby: “It’s the right thing to do. We’re dealing with our future.”
Adds Powazek: “When I go home at the end of the day and my kids ask if we recycle at UCLA, I can tell them, ‘Yes, we do.’”
