Current Event - WWU's Recycle Center

Yay Recycling! With permission from my Professor, I've decided to write a current event about my job at Western Washington University's A.S. Recycle Center. I've been working at the Recycle Center for about a year and a half, starting out as a general laborer and now working as Staff Manager. It's a great job because of the awesome work environment, but also because every day I'm there I'm doing something that aligns with my personal and professional values. While a lot of people recognize me as "that girl who drives the big trucks around campus", a lot of Western students know very little, or nothing at all, about WWU's recycling program.

The Recycle Center was founded in 1971 by a small group of Huxley students and staff members, one of the first recycling programs in the country. It was instrumental in launching Western as one of the most environmental campuses in the nation, and continues to do so today. A few years after it started the university incorporated in into a full time program under the A.S. umbrella, and we've grown ever since.

So what do we do? All those blue barrels you see on campus belong to the R.C.; our workers collect about 650 of them each week and replace them with empty ones. At our facility we hand-sort all of Western's recycling; from mixed paper to glass to plastic, we even take batteries, furniture, and electronics. Everything is broken down into it's component parts so that it can be most efficiently recycled and also most valuably recycled. Because we hand-sort everything, Western recycling (and in fact Bellingham in general), is worth a good deal more than what you would find in Seattle or most other cities. One of the things I love most about the Recycle Center is that not only do we recycle way more than most universities, we do it more cost-efficiently than just about all of them. Our barrels are reused from dairy farms in nearby Lynden; instead of going into a landfill they fuel our entire operation.

I love working for the Recycle Center because you can see the positive impacts before your very eyes. I'm not just being told that Western recycles, I'm seeing 4,000 pounds of proof every day I'm there. Also, the knowledge that, without us, Western would literally collapse is pretty gratifying as well. Before I started working at the Recycle Center I didn't pay much attention to all those blue barrels, but now I know how much the school's students and staff really do depend on us, whether they realize it or not.