History of Recycling at USU

In December of 1990, the official program of USU Recycling began. With a $50,000 initial grant, the program consisted of one vehicle for retrieval, containers for each building on campus, one student employee, and one part-time supervisor. This came after the administration at USU saw the need for such a program to reduce the amount of waste being taken to the landfill. At roughly the same time, the Utah Legislature passed laws requiring all state institutions to implement paper-recycling programs, where feasible, and encouraged the purchase and use of recycled paper to close the recycling loop.

Since December of 1990, the recycling program at USU has grown to include a 10,000 square foot Recycling Center located at 870 East 1250 North in Logan , built in 1994. Now, Solid Waste Management, Surplus Sales, and Laboratory Gas Sales are also included in the system known as Resource Recovery Services. This system facilitates the collection of all materials and equipment that people discard at USU and processes or sells much of it to reduce the amount of waste sent to the Logan Landfill. In the fiscal year of 2009-10, USU recycled approximately 27% of its total solid waste for a total of 662 tons! Each ton kept from the landfill saves USU $29.50 in tipping fees alone, not including the handling and transportation fees saved, which are roughly equvilent to the tipping fees! The Recycling Center has 4 full-time employees and 9 student employees. Surplus Sales is another critical part of the resource recovery system at USU and is responsible for the collection and sale of used goods from campus.

As listed above, USU Recycling only has two part-time students that pick up all of the paper from the buildings on campus! Last fiscal year USU recycled roughly 375 tons of paper alone! That's a lot of paper for just two students in pickups!

There is also only one student that picks up all of the cardboard from campus. Last fiscal year USU recycled roughly 120 tons of cardboard!