Recycling efforts making progress

By Jeff Powers

Missouri Western is recycling paper; the campus maintenance crew takes care of the 96-gallon containers behind all of the buildings on campus, except for the Residence Halls, and hauls them over to the west part of campus for pick-up by RSP Recycling.

They pick up the 96-gallon containers that are filled from 12.5-quart containers in the buildings.

Students and instructors alike can place any form of paper in the recycle containers, as long as it isn’t cardboard.

The containers can then be loaded into bigger containers for weekly pick-up by RSP Recycling. RSP also handles trash disposal for the St. Joseph area.

Lonnie Johnson, director of west campus, is pleased with the results of RSP.

“This is the most success we’ve ever had with a recycling project on campus,” Johnson said.

 This is good news, considering the difficulties Western has had with recycling efforts in the past.

“We’ve tried several times over the years; the companies we would wind up starting with would be out of Kansas City and they would come in and provide containers and do all this stuff, and realize they weren’t making any money,” Johnson said. “So they’d have to pull out and we’d be left with no recycling bins.”

 One reason why RSP is convenient for the campus is that the company is based in St. Joseph.

RSP recycling wanted to start out with just office paper, but had to switch over to all forms of paper, except cardboard, because they weren’t making money.

Bonnie Drees, National Residence Hall Honorary president, indicates that Residence Halls would like to join the campus on recycling, but have yet to get their program up and running.

“It’s in the early stages,” Drees said.

They are working on making the right contacts to handle the paper the residence halls produce and to lessen the work the custodians have been doing with the recycling already in place.

The custodians had to add the recycling duties to their existing work load of maintenance on the buildings: a yearlong fight with weather and use by thousands of students.