Guest article written by Peter Maas, Facilities Maintenance in response to Christina Moore’s article, “Nebraska: not so green after all”

In his 2008 presidential convocation address, the Rev. John P. Schlegel, S.J., committed this campus to improving our recycling and sustainability efforts. Since that address we have been busy expanding and improving our recycling  processes, and I am going to use this article to brag about them a little bit.

By now almost all of the campus’ buildings have been converted to the single-stream recycling process. This means that desk-side trash cans have been replaced with desk-side recycling bins and our custodians only empty the recycling bins.

Departments still get trash pickup but only from central locations within the department. This helps compliance with recycling efforts and allows the recycling bins to be used for any and all

recyclable materials.

We have expanded our recycling program with outdoor recycling bins placed strategically along the mall. Please use the receptacles while you are out on the mall but don’t place food, liquid or glass

in them.

In addition, we have also expanded our recycling efforts to athletic events with donated receptacles in Morrison Stadium and the Ryan Athletic Center. Since Morrison Stadium mostly sells drinks in 20-ounce bottles we have especially good results there.

Every residence hall room came with a blue recycling bin and every floor of your hall comes with at least one of the big blue 96-gallon recycling bins to empty your smaller bin into. They get emptied three times a week so please use them!

Every official Creighton activity such as Fallapalooza, the luau, the pow wow or the Jay Jam Carnival has the big blue recycling bins at it and students are encouraged to use them.

The Sustainability Committee, along with Facilities Management, has a presence at the Earth Day events at the KFC and also at the Sourcing Expo where we have displays about what is and isn’t recyclable. We are there to answer questions about our efforts to be more sustainable.

If you are interested in the Sustainablility Committee, we meet every third Friday at 2 p.m. in the Union Pacific Room of the Lower Reinert Alumni Library. We love to see new faces and get new ideas so please try to make a meeting. The Green Jays, a student-led sustainable-living organization, has regular meetings also. I think it is pretty safe to say that they, also, would love to see new faces and get more ideas!

Creighton generates right around 500,000 pounds of recyclable material per year. That’s 250 tons that gets recycled instead of ending up in a landfill.

Please check out our Sustainability web pages. They go into more detail about what we do to be “green” here at Creighton. And if you have any questions or comments please send them to the following address:  [email protected]. We will be posting the questions and their answers on the Sustainability website so check back often.

Some quick tips about the issues we have most often with

the recycling:

– Glass should never enter the recycling stream. There are a few places that take glass and they are listed on our website but our recycler doesn’t want glass because our compactor shatters it and the people who have to sort the recycling don’t want to get hurt by the glass shards.

– Food and liquid should also never enter our recycling stream. People ask us why the big blue recycling bins sometimes smell bad and we tell them it is because of the food and/or liquid fermenting in there.

– If you send a grocery bag half full of recycling and half full of trash, we throw it out. Nobody wants to sort through used Kleenexes or paper towels to sort out a few cans. Please be courteous and keep all “trash” out of the recycling stream.

Here you will find the address to the Sustainability website. Once at the  Take a look around and please note the official Creighton recyclables list. If you click on the poster you will get a printable copy to refer to later. But, as usual, bookmarking the page for future reference instead of printing it will save paper.

And, in the spirit of being green, please remember that “More recycling is more better.”  Keep up the good work, Creighton!