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The Catholic University of America Student Body is Terrible at Recycling
The Catholic University of America Student Body is Terrible at Recycling
By Alaina Smith March 30, 2023
The District of Columbia has high standards for commercial, government, and residential properties in the district to meet their Zero Waste goals. Their waste reduction and diversion programs are applied to universities just as they are to the local Starbucks. As of 2018, these requirements now include:
Supplying accessible recycling containers.
Communicating information annually including how and what to recycle.
Posting signs showing what to place in recycling bins.
The Zero Waste goal of D.C. recognizes the local, national, and global impact that municipal waste streams have. When local recycling waste streams become contaminated, it becomes fiscally smarter to export that waste to low-income communities and countries around the world that are ill-prepared to process and store the incoming, and potentially hazardous waste.
To prevent this environmental justice? Simple. Just ensure every student, staff, faculty, and visitor on campus recycles perfectly, just as they learned in grade school or from the numbers on the bottom of their plastic bottle. Not so simple after all.
At the beginning of the semester, my RA instructed our floor to bag our recyclables from our rooms before disposing of them into the plastic bagged recycling bins in the trash room.
Plastic Bags are the second biggest contaminant found in single-stream recycling. Thin-film, stretchy, plastics cannot be recycled.
On a warm summer day, flies can be seen swarming around the blue bins of the Pryz. They are attracted to the recycled cups still sticky with Chick-Fil-A sweet tea.
Containers with food or liquid residue are the largest contaminants found in single-stream recycling. If your food or beverage container is not washed and clean from food residue – it is not recyclable.
How do we account for the wish-cyclers and the willfully ignorant? Those who recycle something in the hope that it can be repurposed and those who choose to pollute the waste stream alike must be taken into account to meet D.C. recycling goals and protect against environmental justice.
In short, WB Waste hauls both our trash and recycling. Recyclables on our campus are bagged due to the high contamination rates to keep the bins clean. The University accepts these high levels of contamination, and pays WB Waste an extra fee to remove the recycling from the plastic bags at their facility.
My conclusion, coming to the end of my senior year, is that waste is something we pay for. I hope CatholicU students can learn to improve their habits once they leave this campus as not every city they settle in will be willing to pay to process their contamination.
Ignorance and negligence in recycling something as simple as a plastic bag has a cost, whether in the taxes for municipalities to pay for proper processing or in a low-income community across the world. Once that bottle enters the blue bin, our agency stops. It is the responsibility of every single individual to change their habits, and save lives.
CatholicU Engineers Celebrated with Hard Hat Ceremony
CatholicU Engineers Celebrated with Hard Hat Ceremony
By Alaina Smith October 27, 2022
With a table of white hard hats emblazoned with the Catholic University logo and tripod poster stands lined up in a row, at ten minutes to 5 p.m., Heritage Hall stood ready to welcome students, faculty, and alumni.
On Wednesday, October 19, 2022 the department of engineering held the second annual Hard Hat Ceremony. This event celebrates civil engineering students as they begin their academic careers by gifting them hard hats and high-vis vests. This personal protection equipment is not just protective gear, but for first-year students as well as industry professionals, it represents much more.
In his address to the attendees, Ryan Knox of Clark Construction said, “This is my hard hat, but it is not just a hard hat. My hard hat is a constant reminder of the engineer’s responsibility to be an ethical leader, responsibility to public health and safety, and responsibility to improve our society’s and nation’s infrastructure.”
Just minutes after donning her first hard hat, Eileen Choque remarked, “It is a sign of motivation and hope. You can look to the hard hat and see what you’re working for.”
Dr. Jason Davison of the Department of Civil Engineering began this Hard Hat ceremony one year ago with graduate student Grace Pooley as a means to impact student retention by supporting the self-efficacy of first-year students. The ceremony is modeled after the white-coat ceremony of medicine and contributes to a positive self-identity of burgeoning civil engineers. Davison expects to publish a research paper reporting the results of this intervention by the end of the year.
The Hard Hat Ceremony event connected industry professionals and alumni with engineering students of every year and discipline through a conversation hour. Students, faculty, and community members mingled in Heritage Hall as Senior Engineering students presented their Senior Design Projects. These research teams are tackling problems from bedplate stabilization to water and air pollution, and they will complete these research projects in May of 2023. It was a networking opportunity for students as well, as corporate sponsors Whiting-Turner, ABC Metro Washington, Bozzuto, Consigli, and Clark Construction were in attendance.
In his formal address, Dean Judge remarked, “what a blessing it is to have an administration who understands how important engineering is.” With a chemical engineer as President and a particle physicist as Provost, it is truly an exciting time to be involved in engineering at The Catholic University of America.
View this article on The Tower website.
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