Students who frequent Houston Market found a new addition to the site this year — large shadowboxes above the recycle and landfill bins that help direct trash to the proper location by displaying example objects for each bin.
The effort was a cooperation between Penn’s Business Services and Bon Appétit to be more environmentally friendly and educate students about the impact of the products they consume.
After visiting their previous trash hauler, Blue Mountain Recycling, Business Services decided to focus on promoting recycling efforts.
“That would create the biggest bang for our buck in terms of sustainability,” Business Services spokeswoman Barbara Lea-Kruger said.
Director of Retail Dining for Bon Appétit Michael Brownlee said he has noticed improvements in recycling since the shadowboxes were installed.
Ninety-eight percent of the products used in Houston Market are recyclable, but the area also receives non-Penn traffic. As a result, Business Services views the effort as a way to educate beyond the Penn community.
A few weeks ago, Penn switched trash haulers and now works with Waste Management, which recently opened a new facility in northeast Philadelphia.
This company is “capable of processing a high volume of recyclables and [accepts] additional materials that were previously disposed as trash, such as certain film plastics and rigid plastics,” Ken Ogawa, executive director of Operations and Maintenance at Facilities and Real Estate Services, wrote in an email.
“Our previous vendor was on the latter half of the technology,” Brownlee added.
As a result, he has been able to move many of the goods from the landfill shadowbox to the recycling one.
Trash haulers will only accept a certain amount of contamination — the amount of waste in recycling bins. However, Waste Management has not yet complained to Penn about any problems regarding this issue.
Ogawa attributes this to “improved communication and feedback about the campus recycling system and a heightened sense of responsibility among members of the Penn community to reduce the amount of waste they generate.”
Facilities and Real Estate Services also works with various buildings around campus to “identify the best types of bins and most effective signage for their buildings,” according to Environmental Sustainability Coordinator Dan Garofalo.
McClelland Café has similar shadowboxes, and Business Services plans to improve recycling efforts at 1920 Commons after its renovation next year.
“It’s almost like a game,” Brownlee said about the shadowboxes. “It’s a sense of doing good.”“We’re trying to make it easy for people to do the right thing,” added Pam Lampitt, director of Business Services, Hospitality Services. “I’ve never seen it done like that anywhere else,” College freshman Gloria Lin, regarding the shadowboxes at Houston.
Lin mentioned, however, that she knows Penn students who would not make the extra effort to recycle.
“I feel like it’s just an attitude problem sometimes,” she added.
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