Guilford will celebrate Earth Day on Saturday, April 25, with a festival by the lake featuring live music, food-and lots of trash. The event, dubbed Trashapalooza, aims to get people thinking about trash, recycling and sustainability.”The purpose is, of course, to raise awareness,” said Environmental Sustainability Coordinator Jim Dees. “It’s also kind of a gut-check thing; we think we’re pretty green around here but when we go around and check up on ourselves, there’s still room for improvement.”
The event was originally scheduled for March 25 but was cancelled due to rain. In preparation for Trashapalooza, in February a group of staff and students gathered 486 pounds of waste from trash and recycling dumpsters on Guilford’s campus and amassed it on Founder’s Lawn to weigh and sort.
“Sorting through gives you such a feel of the carelessness that people have,” said first-year Courtney Mandeville. “You take people’s actions and make them more conscious of what they’re doing.”
The group found that 20 percent of what had been put into the trash was recyclable materials and 37.5 percent of what had been put in the recycling was actually trash.
“I wasn’t surprised but (the results) are significant when you consider how we think we are doing as a campus,” said Gabriela Spang, a senior and sustainability intern. “I wasn’t surprised because I’d been looking in the trash and recycling dumpsters for the past couple weeks and I saw that we recycle a lot of things that aren’t recyclable and trash a lot of things that could be recycled.”
Dees agrees that the results of the waste audit point to a misperception about Guilford’s actual recycling habits and highlight the need for improvement.
“The basic message . is that we still have to pay attention to all this,” said Dees. “Just because there are recycling cans around does not mean we are good at recycling. It does matter what you put in there.”
Trashapalooza is just one of Guilford’s recycling awareness events. In January, Dees and Spang began a ten-week project to measure Guilford’s trash and recycling output as a part of RecycleMania, a national recycling competition.
They inventoried campus dumpsters, accumulated the data and submitted it to the National Recycling Coalition, which will rank Guilford based on three categories: the percent of waste recycled, the pounds of recycling per person, and the total waste per person. The results of RecycleMania will be released on April 17.
Dees is not optimistic about Guilford’s ranking.
“I don’t think it will be very favorable,” he said. “We would like to be a whole lot higher than where we actually are with this.”
The purpose of events such as RecycleMania and Trashapalooza is to not only to educate people about recycling, but to empower them. Dees believes this activism is the first step towards reducing and reversing environmental damage.
“A healthy community equals a healthy earth,” said Dees. “If you’re vested in your community, you’re going to care what happens in it, not turn a blind eye to the problems. Things like global warming become things you work on rather than worry about.