When a plastic bottle is placed into a recycling bin on campus, it is headed to another life where it can be crushed, melted and reborn as something new. Unfortunately, not every plastic bottle’s story ends that way. Some bottles and other fully-recyclable products, even ones placed into recycling bins, end up spending the rest of their days in a landfill.

This regrettable circumstance is because of an excess amount of trash left in recycling bins. When the level of trash in a recycling bin reaches a certain point, Friendly Rod’s Recycling, CMU’s recycling company, is unable to sort through it.

“When we open it up and the bin stinks like you wouldn’t believe, we throw it away,” Rodney Johnson of Friendly Rod’s Recycling said. “A certain few people put in the wrong stuff. They just see a big old container and throw in whatever.”

Johnson estimated that so far this semester, things have been going better than usual and at least 80 percent of materials left in the bins do get recycled.

“If they were to sort through each bin, take out all the trash, and salvage what recycling there is, it would take multiple days to collect for just one round,” Amanda Stahlke, communications manager for the Sustainability Council said. “They will pull out a little bit, but they won’t sort our trash for us. It’s our responsibility as students to learn the system and teach our friends.”

The recycling program on campus, run by the Sustainability Council, makes an effort to increase recycling on campus. Clearly-labeled recycling bins are located next to trash bins throughout campus to make recycling an easy choice for students. But not everyone in the CMU population takes their role in recycling seriously. Sometimes just one rotten piece of trash is enough to pollute the entire bin.

“From what I have learned, that is a problem nationwide,” Ryan McConnell, president of the Sustainability Council said. “There is a huge gap between having the resources and having university-aged people educated and caring enough to not throw trash into recycling bins. We plan on doing more education and more bin replacement in order to make it a no-brainer for anybody going up to the trash and recycling.”

While trash is thrown into the recycling bins, recyclable materials are often thrown into the trash bins. Sustainability Council has begun to track the amount of recyclable materials that are simply thrown away by performing a two-week waste audit in ACB.

“Fifty percent of the trash that we collected was recyclable,” McConnell said. “That’s just the ACB, but we’d like to do a waste audit for the entire school, and that’s the only way to know those numbers.”