LSU students and organizations show what it means to ‘Geaux Green’ on Sunday with post-gameday recycling efforts.
Every year LSU participates in the Game Day Recycling Challenge, a national competition between universities to reduce waste during one home football game. This year, it came down to the LSU-Texas A&M matchup.
The challenge is a Campus Waste to Zero Waste program put on by the National Wildlife Federation. LSU Campus Sustainability Manager Lisa Mahoney said the goal is to promote a recycling culture for future game days.
“The easiest thing a user can do is to recycle,” Mahoney said.
On Friday, volunteers placed around 300 recycling bins around campus and tailgate areas.
Mahoney said bins were placed in the Touchtown Village parking lot, on the lawn of Patrick F. Taylor Hall and by the Vet School.
It all started at 4 a.m.– in the middle of a tornado watch– with students collecting the recycling bins around campus and in Tiger Stadium. After collecting the materials, they were dropped off at the bus depot on Gourrier Ave. to be sorted.
Under a pavillon, crawfish peeling tables and white folding tables were set up for sorting. Each table had grey square bins directly under them to catch the recyclables. White buckets were placed in the corner of the tables for students to drain any leftover liquid from the bottles.
The crawfish tables are wide, metal tables with six predrilled holes meant to discard crawfish shells. Here, they were used to easily drop the bottles into the grey bins below. Four of the holes were used for aluminum cans while the other two were for plastic bottles.
At the end of all the tables, a normal trash can was placed for excess trash such as pizza boxes, chip bags or contaminated items like spit cups. Students grabbed a bag, dumped it onto the table and picked through each item to sort.
The sound of metal clanking together filled the air. As more bags arrived to be sorted, the students’ morale never appeared to waver.
Brook King, a member of Geaux Green, said she was there for her love of climate action and sustainability. She said it was fun to come out and that sorting the items was like playing a game.
King said being sustainable is all about mindfulness and wanting to change. She said she goes to the football games with her dad so she knows she contributes to the trash problem.
“I think it is my responsibility to come and deal with the aftermath,” King said.
The sorting process is led by Osprey Initiative, which measures and counts the amount of items recycled. Osprey Regional Manager Trevor Besse said the organization creates an audit of the data to give more insight to the recycling efforts.
Osprey has also partnered with campus life to help reduce litter across campus.
Besse said last year it was able to determine that there was 47% recycled material compared to 53% waste. He said the data can tell LSU things such as what items to eliminate if the university wanted to reach zero waste.
“With it being student driven, students get to see how LSU is doing their part in sustainability,” Besse said.
LSU students were not the only students helping out. Albany High School basketball and baseball players were also there. Athletic Director Chris Beckham said Osprey makes a donation to the program for helping out.
Once a grey bin was full, volunteers poured it into dumpsters that were separated by plastic or aluminum. To keep count, Osprey Environmental Field Technician Sawyer Pendry kept a tally of every bin that was dumped.
Pendry said she found out about Osprey through volunteering while at LSU. She said Osprey counts the amount of bottles in one bin and weighs it. Then, she said they repeat this for five different bins.
Pendry said they take the average of the five bins to apply for the rest of the bins tallied up. Within half an hour, 50 bins of aluminum cans and 20 bins of plastic bottles had already been counted.
The total amount collected by LSU will determine whether it wins the challenge in January. Mahoney said LSU won the challenge in 2016, 2017 and 2019 but has not done as well since COVID-19.
However, Mahoney said they are trying to get back in the game with enhancements each year. She said the office received grants from Keep Louisiana Beautiful that allowed it to upgrade the recycle bins used.
The sorting is only a piece of the entire process. Afterwards, Besse said the collected aluminum goes to Novelis, a recycling and rolling mill in north Alabama. For the plastic, he said it is sent to Indorama Ventures to be remade back into plastic bottles or polyester material.
Along with aluminum and plastic, glass was also collected. Mahoney said the materials get sent to Glass Half Full, a local initiative in Louisiana that turns the glass into sand to be used for coastal restoration.
The impact on the environment is what is important to chemical engineering sophomore Lily Bradford. She said it felt good to see stuff being recycled and being part of it.
Bradford said she is super passionate about sustainability and tries to recycle in her day-to-day life. She said if everyone does their small part then it can make a huge difference.
“We only have one Earth, and we really need to take care of it,” Bradford said.
This story originally appeared in the LSU Reveille by Kaley Melancon. You can read the original story online here.
