SUNY Fredonia takes top honors among SUNYs in RecycleMania

Campus achieves 59 percent year-over-year improvement

They say the third time is often “the charm,” but for SUNY Fredonia, year four turned out to be the best one yet.

The campus once again participated in RecycleMania, the annual spring semester competition among colleges and universities designed to promote waste reduction while instilling lifelong recycling habits within its participants. After four straight years in the event, SUNY Fredonia saw a noticeable uptick in a variety of metrics, finishing in first place among all of the competing SUNY schools in RecycleMania’s Per Capita category.

Blue Devils young and old generated a per-capita ranking of 19.09 pounds of recycled materials per person, good for 71st among 363 schools overall (up from 106th in 2010, which had over 100 fewer participants), and tops among the seven SUNY schools entered. In all, Fredonia increased its recycled contents by more than 59,000 total pounds or five pounds per person over 2010, a nearly 59 percent increase from the slightly more than 100,000 pounds it generated during the eight-week competition last year. This was also good for a ranking of 10th among 23 participants in New York State.

Campus officials credit the increase in large part to its move to a single-source recycling system and the sizable increase in recycling receptacles located throughout the campus, as well as persistent educational efforts such as the recently completed Earth Week, which have positively impacted both students and employees alike. The results speak for themselves, as nearly seven more pounds per person were recycled on the Fredonia campus in 2011 than in 2008, the college’s first year in the competition, when it generated just 12.45 pounds per person.

The campus also wishes to thank Casella Waste Systems for assisting it in weighing and recording its recycled contents throughout the competition.

To view the full competition results, visit www.recyclemaniacs.org.