The MAX-R BLOG
Education
Education • Recycling Process • Recycling Topics
Is America's Recycling Industry Really in the "Dumps"?
Recycling is a manufacturing process. The recyclable materials we collect are commodities and like any commodities there are ebbs and flows in supply and demand.
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Education • Metrics • Sustainability
How Do Your Sustainability Efforts Contribute To Student Recruitment?
Imagine you are a wide-eyed 18-year-old presented with one of the first major decisions of your life. What makes you choose one campus over another?
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Education • Logistics • Recycling Topics
Understanding "Outthrows" To Avoid Recycling Confusion
Have your recycling markets gotten more restrictive in recent months? Are you struggling to explain the new recycling rules to the public? The answer may be "outthrows".
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Campus Move Out
The end of the school year is coming. With it, if you are a residential campus, comes one of the biggest waste and recycling events of the year: student move out. To help make your move out a diversion success story, here are five tips, along with links to prior blog posts, that can give you more in-depth information
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Back to School
If you are a college or university, depending on when classes start, you are either already knee deep in student move-in issues or about to be. If you are a new reader, below are some previously-written blog posts to help you navigate some of the recycling and sustainability issues you will encounter as the students return. And if you are a returning reader, hopefully one of these posts will remind you of something that you said you wanted to try this year.
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Making the Most of Student Move Out
If you manage recycling programs at a residential campus, student move out is one of the most frantic periods of the year. If you’re new to the process, it can be overwhelming. But, regardless of whether you are still planning for move out, staring at the piles of discarded stuff accumulating as students are moving out, or have already missed your window of opportunity and are merely leaving notes for things to do better next year, focusing on the six items below will help.
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Education • Waste and Recycling
Restricted Access
For recycling to work, you have to segregate the materials that you want to recycle from those that you don’t. If you didn’t have a restrictive lid you would typically rely on a label on the front of your bin to identify that stream. But for bin labels to work most effectively, you need a clear line of sight and adequate time to read the label.
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Education • Planning • Recycling Process
Education in Residence Halls, Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I proposed that the most effective way to deliver this education is a hybrid system that uses the existing access of the resident assistants (RAs) and bolsters it with a smaller group of expert and enthusiastic enviro-liaisons.
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Education • Planning • Recycling Process
Education in Residence Halls, Part 1
Residence halls are home for any resident students that you have on campus for the 8+ months per year that they live there. That means that at some point you are going to need to do recycling education in the residence halls. The question is how.
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Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Sustainability at Student Orientation
Orientation for new college & university students is almost here. Whether your orientation is a weekend or an entire week, it can be an important but tricky opportunity. At many schools you have every member of the incoming class concentrated into a handful of events or even a single event. If you can get into that event, or events, it provides a tremendous opportunity to access and convey information to the entire incoming student body.
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Education • Planning • Recycling Process
Know Your Campus, Part 3
For part 3 of this “Know Your Campus” series, I am going to focus on location. Some folks in real estate are fond of suggesting that location is everything. I wouldn’t go that far, but location can have a profound impact on how you manage your recycling and sustainability programs. In terms of location, I would suggest there are 3 main categories of schools: Urban campuses, Semi-urban/suburban campuses, Rural campuses
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Education • Operations • Planning
Know Your Campus, Part 2
For this part 2, I am focusing on some of the differences between public and private schools. Every school has a complicated mix of funding sources, a lot of which I am going to gloss over (consider this the intro 100-level version). For those of you who are recent students making the transition to coordinator or who are folks new to working with schools, I am hoping this overview helps.
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Education • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Student Move Out Day, Part 4
Student move out day is coming (sooner than you realize). When the students are moving out, where do you want them to put their unwanted stuff? How do they know where to go and where to throw away/recycle/re-purpose that stuff?
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Student Move Out Day, Part 3
“I can’t believe what those kids leave behind.” If you do enough end-of-the-year student move outs, you hear that statement a lot. If you’re making that statement to note the number of opportunities that there are to recover valuable materials, and how much of a shame it is to see that stuff end up in a landfill, then we’re on the same page.
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Student Move Out Day, Part 2
There are over 1,500 4-year colleges and universities across the U.S. and almost all of them have some portion of their enrollment that lives on campus and has to move out at the end of the year. When those students move out, there is a huge surge of trash that goes along with it. At more residential schools, it is not uncommon to see trash totals nearly double the month that students move out.
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Education • Operations • Planning
Know Your Campus, Part 1
Every campus is a little bit different. Ironically, if you break a campus down into individual parts (e.g. traditional dormitory-style residence halls, apartment/suite style residence halls, faculty offices, departmental offices, cash-operations dining, dining commons, etc.), each individual part is actually pretty darn similar. But what makes each campus completely unique is the combination of parts, scale of the parts, the overall academic philosophy, and the fundamental business model of the campus. For the next few blog posts, I am planning to focus on some of the biggest differences and some fundamental changes those differences bring.
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
An Open Letter to Students During Move Out
This is an open letter to college students, their families, and their friends all across the country. Please forward this to anyone that you know who is moving out of a residence hall in the next few months or just as importantly anyone who is going to a college or university campus to help their child, sibling or friend move out
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Planning for Student Move Out
At every residential school I have ever worked with, the trash nearly doubles in May when the students move out. Way too much of that is perfectly nice stuff that is not deliberately left behind. It is left behind because it didn’t fit.
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Education • Operations • Planning
Sustainability Projects and Student Groups
As a staff member or administrator, working with student clubs and organizations can sometimes be both the most rewarding experience and sometimes the most frustrating. Don’t let this potentially great experience be doomed by false expectations.
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Best practices • Education • Waste and Recycling
Recycling at Student Orientation
New students are coming. And when they get to campus, those first few hours, days, and weeks will be what they imprint on, and it will shape their entire college experience. If you can imprint positive recycling behaviors on them right away, those behaviors are likely to carry with them their entire time on campus. If you miss that window and they imprint on negative behaviors, you will spend the next 4 years overcoming that negative imprinting.
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Education • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Aligning Chores, Part 1
There are a lot of different materials to recycle on a college or university campus and a lot of steps needed to make recycling work. So how do you decide who does what tasks?
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Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
Cardboard Recycling & Student Move In
Cardboard is coming. A lot of it. On campus terms, for many schools, you are looking at as much as an extra month’s worth of cardboard that arrives the first week when students move-in. So what do you do with it all?
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Education • Recycling Topics • Waste and Recycling
Recycling at Student Move In
New students are coming. If you can imprint positive recycling behaviors on them right away, those behaviors are likely to carry with them their entire time on campus. If you miss that window and they imprint on negative behaviors, you will spend the next 4 years overcoming that negative imprinting.
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Education • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Understanding Why
In my last post, I focused on the critical role that information plays in your recycling program. But there is one big piece that information doesn’t cover. That is why. There are a lot of different parts of “why”, depending on what you intend to do with it.
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Education • Operations • Waste and Recycling
Everything I Know I Learned from Where?
One of the trickiest parts of running recycling or sustainability on a college or university campus is education. Implementing recycling education at an institution whose very mission is education runs into a lot of potential pitfalls and conflicts.
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Learning To Bunt
What did you do today to help get some runners on base and some points on the board?
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Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
How On Earth Do You Reach Students?
I have been asked some version of that question more times that I can count by more people than I can count. But the same question is asked in many different areas of many different target audiences: residents, employees, etc.
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Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
They're Coming. Are You Ready? Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I talked about how much the world has changed. I urged readers to think about their recycling programs and to update them accordingly. The question is how?
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Education • Sustainability • Waste and Recycling
They're Coming. Are You Ready? Part 1
The class of 2015 is almost upon us (the year in which the entering 1st year class will graduate from a traditional 4-year college)
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Education • Planning • Waste and Recycling
Recycling Program Evolution, Part 2
It is this intermediate phase that seems to be the most complicated for many programs to get through. Every transition from one phase to the next takes planning and hard work. But in over 20 years of working with recycling programs, I have seen more programs get stuck in this intermediate phase of their development than any other. Some spend decades in this phase whereas others progress through it relatively quickly to get to the integrated sustainable program that they really want.
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Best practices • Education • Waste and Recycling
Finding the Right Level
For many student-run recycling programs, or other pilot programs, we are at that point in the year where they need to start thinking about administrative support, either to continue their program next semester, or to start thinking about building support to expand the program next year. Because of that, let me take a departure from talking about measuring recycling rates and talk for a post or two about getting support for your recycling program.
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