Milligan has been working toward becoming a more sustainable campus through many different means. Most recently, Webb Hall has taken this challenge pretty seriously with a dorm-wide recycling battle.
The RA who came up with the idea was junior Joshua Mangano. He realized Webb Hall did not participate in recycling, and after taking the environmental science course taught by Associate Professor of Biology Dr. Brian Eisenback he wanted to do something about it.
“I credit it to Dr. Eisenback and environmental science; everyone should take it,” Mangano said.
After learning about how the world functions in Eisenback’s class, the class ended the semester with how to take the concepts they learned and apply them to their lives.
“I was thinking about how it would be cool if Webb didn’t throw everything in the dumpster,” Mangano said. “We wanted to give the residents of Webb incentive to recycle. And so we decided to create a competition between each RA’s residents.”
There are six RAs in Webb, two on each floor. So each RA and their residents make up one team.
Webb Hall will be recycling paper, plastic and aluminium cans. The residents are bringing all of their recycling to their RAs and will weigh how much is brought in. The competition started in February and will end early April. The winning RA and their team gets a special dinner.
“We wanted to do it for a large chunk of the semester to emphasize it and learn consistency, because it’s not just a one time thing they do … and just make them aware of how if we’re not careful how much waste we produce,” Mangano said in response to why he thought the competition was important.
Junior RA Jon Guy and his residents have had an interesting experience with the program.
“They’re excited about it; they love it,” he said. “I really like walking into my room and just finding trash there. I’m like, ‘I’ve been pranked–oh, wait, no, this is the program.’”
In exchange for dishes that have been taken from the cafeteria, Milligan’s SGA has negotiated the use of take out containers for drinks and ice cream. This, however, also raises the question of how sustainable this extra waste is.
Sophomore Jenee Boston, parlimartian of SGA, explained how and why they did what they did.
“I don’t think that the to-go containers affect the sustainability of Milligan considering the overall lack of motivation to recycle at Milligan. If enough students think that the to-go cups are a sustainability problem, we are 100 percent willing to back and talk to Mark and Corey again,” Boston said, referring to the cafeteria’s food service directors. “This is our first response to what has been asked of us, so we are willing to make improvements if need be. We did not specify the material of the to-go containers; that was not an SGA decision.”
She went on to add, “We just voted the recycling club into existence. Our events committee is working with them to hopefully have a recycling event to bring attention to the issue. These issues can sometimes take longer than we expect to be resolved.”