TUCSON, Ariz. - It doesn’t take long to take note of what’s different about the University of Arizona Mall from what students would ordinarily find positioned throughout the halls of many campus buildings and common areas.

Recycling bins, indeed, are not abundant in sight on the stretch of campus along East University Boulevard bounded by North Campbell Avenue to the east and Old Main to the west.

“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” ASUA Sen. James Pennington-McQueen said. “Of, course, we don’t ever really get the amount of money we need for lots of what we want to do. On top of that, Tucson’s recycling capability is a bit limited in terms of the volume that they can handle.”

The absence of recycling bins on the Mall has also been linked to aesthetic concerns, in the sense that the university has wanted to keep the space free from the clutter of excess cans, Pennington-McQueen added.


Last year, the UA sent roughly 827 tons of recyclable material to Tucson recycling depots, a list of which can be found on the UA Facilities Management’s recycling page.

“It’s kind of irritating to me,” said Matt Boehme, a sophomore who plays games of touch football on the Mall with a handful of friends from his residence hall every Sunday afternoon. “I’m tempted to chuck my water bottles in the trash because there aren’t any bins nearby.”

That tonnage amounted to 14.4 percent of the total amount of trash on campus that the UA would ordinarily send to landfills. The national average diversion rate for recyclable material is about 22 percent, according to the College and University Recycling Council.

Aside from that, UA Recycling Waste and Management services' recycling efforts in 2007 saved a little more than 11,256 trees, 818 tons of possible air pollution and enough electricity to power 251 homes per year.

"We have a very aggressive recycling program, and we're always putting out more recycling bins where they're needed," said Christopher M. Kopach, the UA facilities management associate director. "We currently have over 295 containers for recycling white paper and 100 for soda cans, plastic bottles and newspapers."

Kopach said that the contents of recycling bins are deposited into larger recycling clusters on campus and taken to the UA recycling yard north of campus on East Ring Road.

"Ideally we'd like to get a lot more to recycling facilities than what we can do at the moment," Kopach said. "Unfortunately we find a lot of stuff that can't be recycled in the bins."

Sen. Pennington-McQueen and his ASUA colleagues are a little less than satisfied with the recycling and sustainability numbers at the moment. But they hope the growing popularity and resonance of green issues at the national level will trickle down to increased awareness and improvement of states’ and cities’ sustainability programs.

“As a governing body, we’ve had some difficulty generating interest in the student body to get behind the sustainability movement," Sen. Pennington-McQueen said. “I think in five to 10 years that you’re going to see a huge shift on this campus in favor of more of the things associated with sustainability.”

Sen. Pennington-McQueen points to other sustainability areas where ASUA can claim bigger accomplishments, including the installation of waterless urinals in the Student Recreation Center that save about 40,000 gallons of water per urinal.

For now, the biggest recycling efforts on campus come from Residence Life and the Student Union Memorial Center.

"I think there should be a recycling bin around trash cans on the Mall every 100 feet," said Boehme, who also thinks that UA should donate most of the money it saves from recycling to charitable organizations. "It just doesn't make sense to have to throw stuff that can be recycled into trash cans."