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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Recycling guru Alonzo Lewis, maintenance
operations manager in New
Brunswick/Piscataway, spearheaded
improvements to Rutgers’ recycling
programs. “Recycling is a philosophy as
well as a policy,” says Lewis, who has
worked at Rutgers for 31 years.
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Individually, a morsel of chocolate cake, a barely gnawed burger and some leftover salad don’t scare Charles Sams, director of the Division of Dining Services, New Brunswick/Piscataway. Collectively, the same garbage proves more daunting, especially when multiplied by the approximately 3.5 million meals he oversees each year. The half-eaten repasts that students, faculty and staff so casually discard at dining commons across campus amalgamate into a monster Sams tames with alacrity: edible food waste.
According to Sams, a single large dining unit can create as much as 825 gallons of edible food waste each day. Such leftovers – no drop in the bucket – metamorphose into slop in the trough, thanks to the recycling efforts of Dining Services. Battered to mere pulp by high-tech equipment that extracts moisture, the waste is reduced significantly in volume and placed into 55-gallon barrels. A Hillsborough farmer then hauls it off and reuses it as feed for his pigs and cows.
The alchemy of turning edible waste into animal fodder represents just one aspect of a universitywide commitment to recycling, a dedication that has made Rutgers’ recycling program a gold standard in the nation.
The edibles, and a whole lot more, contributed to the 14,322 tons of recycled materials generated from all three Rutgers campuses in 2004, according to a report issued by University Facilities.
Separate and distinct from the organic material, the list of materials recycled by Rutgers includes objects familiar to a household recycling bin, such as glass, paper and paper products, aluminum and certain plastic containers. And there are other materials particular to an organizational setting: fluorescent tubes and light ballasts, concrete, asphalt, laboratory chemicals and miscellaneous electronics. These recyclables are collected in dumpsters on campus and recovered by a variety of local waste management companies. The actual sorting and processing of materials takes place at the companies’ venues.
“As we grew as a university, we realized we couldn’t keep polluting the environment with waste,” says Dianne Gravatt, director of environmental services and grounds in New Brunswick. “Rutgers was on board with recycling long before many other American institutions, in either the public or private sector. We are one of the top recyclers in the nation and as big as any municipality in New Jersey.” Rutgers underscores the need to live “green” with greenbacks from facilities’ annual budget. In 2004, the university spent approximately $247,000 on recycling.
The Rutgers Recycling Program dates back nearly two decades to 1987, when the state Legislature passed the New Jersey Source Separation and Recycling Act. The law mandated that state institutions, such as Rutgers, recycle at least 60 percent of their solid waste by 1995. Unfortunately, the legislation offered little guidance about what to recycle or how to administer a comprehensive program.
Rutgers rallied to the cause and, in May 1992, the University Senate unanimously passed the Recycling and Reduction Policy and the Recycled Products Procurement and Use Policy. These stringent guidelines became the basis of the recycling program at Rutgers and remain so today. They addressed not only the nuts and bolts of recycling procedures but also established innovative educational programs to inspire a “reduce, reuse and recycle” mentality within the university community.
Soon, recycling fever struck all the Rutgers campuses and the university went above and beyond recycling the 60 percent of solid waste mandated by state legislation. The aggregate of the recycling effort equaled 67.5 percent of the university’s solid waste in 2004.
Under the tutelage of maintenance operations manager Alonzo Lewis, widely acknowledged as Rutgers’ recycling “guru,” the program began winning awards statewide, including the 2001 Outstanding Achievement in Recycling Award from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
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