After many semesters of various organizations trying to bring recycling to Tyler Junior College, Phi Theta Kappa and Club Tennis have finally succeeded.
Phi Theta Kappa and Club Tennis have made recycling bins available at Rogers Student Center.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Janet York, a Health Information Technology major at TJC, said. “It’s just as easy to throw it in a recycling bin as it is to throw it in a trash can.”
The recycling bins are provided by the Tyler Solid Waste Department. There are two types of bins located at Rogers Student Center. One of the bins is used for two types of plastics, #1 and #2. Plastic #1 includes water and soda bottles.
“Number 2s are like milk jugs and detergent bottles, so, [you] probably won’t see many of those at TJC,” Kristi Boyett, special projects coordinator for the city of Tyler and a former Apache Bell, said.
Students can identify the type of plastic an item is by looking at the bottom for the recycling triangle. Inside the recycling triangle is a number that identifies the plastic’s number. However, in case of wooden waste materials like furniture etc, students can check this out, where the article talks about various ways by which these items can be recycled/dumped.
The second bin is used for office paper. According to Boyett, newspapers and magazines are made of different material than office paper, so they will not go in the paper bin.
“We want to keep contamination levels low,” Boyett said. “We call it contaminated if the wrong things are on the wrong bins.”
The recycling committee within Phi Theta Kappa takes the recycling material to the Tyler Solid Waste Department.
TJC is not the only place students and faculty can recycle.
“A lot of people don’t know that the city of Tyler offers recycling at your home,” Melanie Bishop, president of Phi Theta Kappa and a Pre-Med major, said.
Tyler’s Solid Waste Department has a curbside program that allows Tyler residents to sign up for a recycling cart at their home and have it picked up twice a month. Boyett said that from October 2008 to the present, curbside recycling has increased up to 746 tons.
“Only 10 percent of our garbage customers are recycling customers, so just imagine how much tonnage we could recycle if everyone turned to recycling,” Boyett said.
Phi Theta Kappa and Club Tennis hope that the bins at Rogers Student Center will encourage TJC students and faculty to recycle. They hope to have more recycling bins placed in other buildings on campus in the future.
“We’re in that Green mode, so I think the more that you can do, the better,” York said.
For more information on the recycling center or curbside recycling, visit http://www.tylersolidwaste.com. For more information on TJC’s recycling project, e-mail Danielle Robinson, Phi Theta Kappa’s vice president of service and an English major, at witheverybreath@gmail.com.
