Environmental Collaborative Office (Mississippi State University)

News Archive

Comprehensive recycling rolls out on campus

June 16, 2010

Mississippi State University's new recycling program is underway, and members of the campus community are excited about the additional opportunity to go green, according to the director of the MSU Environmental Collaborative Office.

"The recycling response has exceeded expectations," said Jeremiah Dumas, whose office coordinates sustainability initiatives at the land-grant institution. "Comprehensive, single-stream recycling provides an easy-to-use and cost-effective complement to MSU's existing waste management program."

In April, university officials signed an agreement with Columbus-based Triangle Maintenance Service, LLC, for the company's BluBox Recycling division to service the Starkville campus. Over the past few weeks, BluBox personnel have started delivering recycling bins to campus locations, and students, faculty, staff and visitors are encouraged to toss paper of all types, plastics (Nos. 1-7), aluminum, metal, glass and cardboard into the blue boxes.

As the program expands, more buildings will see the bins, but recycling is also growing office by office. According to Dumas, the new program allows for most waste to be recycled. "Our goal is to make recycling as easy as possible by turning people's current wastebaskets into individual recycling bins so that they can recycle right at their desks and don't have to use a central recycling bin."

Dumas offers this simple reminder: blue bags and blue bins mean recycling. "Within an office environment, basically the only thing we can't recycle are food waste items, and we are centralizing the collection of that waste thus streamlining the process by allowing custodial staff to remove blue bags with recycling from desk-side containers and food-contaminated waste from the containers in the common areas."

For additional information about recycling, please contact Dumas at jdumas@finadmin.msstate.edu or (662) 325-0216. The MSU Environmental Collaborative Office is online at http://www.eco.msstate.edu.