Springtime at Yale: while the grounds crews are planting, New Haveners are reaping -- furniture, electronics, and other goodies cast off by departing students. So renowned is this May harvest in the city that a downtown denizen once organized a "Dumpster-diving Olympics" and wrote about it in a local newspaper.
This spring, scavengers found a sparser yield: some 54 tons of usable stuff, with an estimated value of $88,000, had been diverted from the dumpsters and donated instead to area charities. The haul, known as Spring Salvage, included 384 lamps, 256 trash cans, and 2,400 hangers, many of which would have otherwise ended up being incinerated. The success of Spring Salvage is a bright spot in a recycling program that, despite its longevity -- student volunteers launched it in the early 1970s -- still struggles to change the way Yalies think about the things they own, use, and toss.
"Yale is in the unenviable position of having to look up to that university in Cambridge," says C. J. May '89MEM, Yale's recycling coordinator since 1990. Harvard, he notes, recycles more than 40 percent of its waste, while "we've stagnated right below 20 [percent] for years."
But May is abundantly optimistic. He sees a dramatic change in attitudes, spearheaded by President Rick Levin and by Julie Newman, director of the Office of Sustainability. "Julie Newman's arrival on campus has really galvanized efforts," he says. "I used to push Yale: 'Can we do more, can we do more?' Now it's Yale pushing me: 'C. J., hurry up.'"
One such pronto project, he says, was desk-side paper collection in Yale offices. Every desk had a recycling bin, but most employees had to carry them down the hall to empty them. Wastebaskets, on the other hand, were emptied daily by the custodial staff. Not surprisingly, people threw away literally tons of recyclable paper.
A trial program in 2006 introduced a combo receptacle: big recycling bin, small wastebasket. Custodians emptied both. "We saw a tremendous decrease in trash and a tremendous increase in recycling," May reports. The program is now in place campus-wide.
Similarly, this year's Spring Salvage made it easier to donate than to discard -- part of the reason it outstripped the 2006 effort by more than 40 percent. "We put donation bins directly next to the entryway doors," says Sara Smiley Smith '07MES, '07MPH, a PhD candidate who oversaw the program. "But the dumpsters were out in the street. You have to engineer situations where it's easier to do things in a greener way."
Ultimately, May thinks "the major challenge is really to change attitudes. Certainly you can change systems. But if Yalies don't think of themselves as recyclers, we're going to continue to lag behind Harvard."
He sees that change
happening, and he credits Levin's and Newman's leadership in making green a
Yale value: "People who used to pooh-pooh recycling now come up to me and say, 'Hey,
how's it going?' And I can hear the respect in their voices." 