By: Ernest Gurulé
Call it the ‘little engine that could,’ southern Colorado’s Pueblo Community College and its move toward creating a green or, at least, a greener college environment. The school which serves an estimated 6,500 students at its Pueblo, Bayfield, Durango High School, Fremont County and Mancos campuses is ratcheting up its efforts to become more environmentally sustainable.
In just the recent past, PCC has upped its recycling success rate from sixteen percent to twenty percent, said Joe Waneka, PCC’s Director of the Office of Facilities and Construction. To boost its green effort even higher, he said, won’t be easy but can be done.
The challenge, said Waneka, “is ownership of the overall opportunity and taking pride in where you place your refuse.” Awareness, said the veteran recycling expert, begins at the simplest of starting points: reeducation. Waneka, who has worked on a number of campuses including K-12 districts in Boulder County and Fort Collins, said changing mindsets is easier when the audience is younger and more enthusiastic about rethinking the subject.
“You have to show them demonstrable lessons,” he said, including those learned in school assemblies and by hands-on examples.
If anyone thinks lessons on recycling or reusing are rubbish, a few facts: It takes a little as a month for a glass container to go from a recycling bin to a reusable container and back on to store shelves; a single aluminum can tossed away today will be the same aluminum can 500 years from today; one recycled ton of paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space and 7,000 gallons of water.
One more astounding fact, each year Americans throw away enough paper to erect a 12-foot wall stretching from San Francisco to New York City.
“It’s a challenge,” said Waneka. “It’s just ownership of the overall opportunity.” On the PCC campus, Waneka has made it a point to place recycle receptacles in optimum spaces. In small, but important ways, the effort is paying off. “I know our facilities team supports the effort,” he said.
“Sometimes they’ll even peek into the receptacle to see if there’s something in there that shouldn’t be and they’ll try and redivert it.”
But recycling is more than a responsible way of repurposing refuse. It’s also a simple matter of dollars and cents.
“My big thing,” said Waneka, “is our refuse costs jumped by thirty percent…over the last five years.” As a result, the school had to begin “scaling back on dump frequency.”
But going green is not just all about recycling, Waneka stresses. It also means adopting a new way of thinking. “A year ago we went through a campus-wide retrofit,” that included changing the lighting in offices and classrooms.”
The result, same light quality, lower costs. PCC’s President Patty Erjavec also redirected the school’s effort into transitioning to a third party electronics recycling effort. It now contracts with a company that is charged with hauling off and properly recycling everything from fluorescent lighting to electronic components. “We also have a product that we’re using called a bulb eater that separates mercury from glass components.” The overall effort has resulted in “a savings of $450,000.” Using 21st century methods, he said, means instead of tossing potentially recyclable items away, they can be reclaimed. “If I can keep it out of the landfill,” he said, “that (money) goes back into education and the general fund.”
The challenge Waneka and others like him face in the war on waste will be with us for some time to come. But small victories, he believes, will ultimately add up. We can learn from each other and if it takes incentives to maintain the momentum in the war against waste, he said, it will ultimately pay off. By learning the lessons others have found successful, in the end “you’re going to get your nickel back.”
