Athletic events are not the only competitions going on around UW-Platteville this spring. RecycleMania, an international initiative designed to help save the earth, has made its way on campus for the 2010 season and in a few short weeks almost 5,000 pounds of recycled materials have been collected.

Photograph by Anthony Bauer


Andrea Droessler, administrative assistant with the Pioneer Involvement Center went through garbage bins last week to make sure people were recycling properly.

RecycleMania was started in 2001 by Ed Newman of Ohio University and Stacy Edmonds Wheeler of Miami University. It doubled in size each following year until 2009, when all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated in the event and international countries were invited to participate.

According to the organization’s Web site, “RecycleMania is a friendly competition and benchmarking tool for college and university recycling programs to promote waste reduction activities to their campus communities.” The site calls colleges “small cities that consume large amounts of resources and generate much solid waste,” and “seeks to present waste reduction in terms any college student can appreciate: beating the cross town rival.” In the past, the site reports, recycling increased in 80 percent of participating schools during the competition’s 10-week period.

The competition starts in mid-January and continues through March. The main goal of the program is to encourage students to see how much they can reduce, reuse and recycle. Students are encouraged to reduce how many resources they use by doing things like printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. Reusing involves investing in water bottles and thermoses, instead of using paper cups. And recycling encourages putting trash in the trash, plastic with plastic, paper with paper, etc.

“If you put contaminants in with recycling—like stuffing napkins in a plastic bottle—it cannot be used,” said Barb Daus, special assistant to the chancellor. “It is very important for students to put their garbage in the garbage, their recycling in the recycling. It is like a matching game.”

RecycleMania came to the attention of UW-P’s Rob Cramer, assistant chancellor for administrative services, last semester. He worked with Donna Perkins’ quality management class, which was divided into teams and asked to come up with for implementing the competition at UW-P. It was decided that UW-P would take place in the benchmarking this year. Ullsvik, Ottensman, the Pioneer Student Center and the Karrmann Library are the four main buildings in which RecycleMania is taking place. New recycling containers have been set up and clearly marked.

“We have too many landfills already,” Daus said. “How much land are we going to use? How many trees will we cut? When are we going to become better caretakers of our environment? One in 100 students in the world have the chance to go to college. Students here are pretty fortunate. If they cannot be leaders, who do we expect to do it?”

And while recycling and environmental issues are very serious concerns, those involved say it can also be made into a fun task.

“Have fun with it,” Andrea Droessler, who works on UW-P’s RecycleMania, said. “Like other campuses, we want to promote this competition. We could get students to dress up and get the word out.”

UW-P took recycling inventory after the first week of RecycleMania. Ullsvik Hall turned out 166 pounds of cans and bottles, 400 pounds of cardboard, 726 pounds of paper and 1,060 pounds of waste. That is a total of 2,352 pounds, with 54.93 percent of it recycled material. The PSC generated a total of 8,282 pounds, 23.59 percent of it recycled. The Karrmann Library had 1,266 pounds total, with 84.2 percent recycled, and Ottensman Hall had 848 pounds total, with 45.01 percent recycled. Overall, these four buildings produced 13,442 pounds of discarded material total, 37.24 percent of it recycled.