Those familiar with the Brownsville campus may have noticed there are no more plastic-recycling bins.
“We are in the process of evaluating,” said Martin Cortez, assistant director of Facilities Maintenance and Operations for the Brownsville campus. “We are going to start a new recycling program because the company we used to have before is no longer here, but we are in the process. We are trying to work out some details, and we are going to start with a
pilot building.”
Cortez said the university is still working on the details for plastic recycling, but is going to start off by adding more bins for recycling paper in a couple of weeks.
“We are going to buy some bins and find an area, try out and see how is that going to function,” he said. “We are going to start off with paper. Before, we were doing plastic bottles but this company that we are talking to, they are going to do paper.”
Even though students on the Brownsville campus will not have access to recycling bins for plastic anytime soon, students on the Edinburg campus do.
“We do have recycling bins [for paper, cans and plastic] throughout the university,” said Carlos Chavez, assistant director of Facilities Maintenance and Operations for the Edinburg campus. “There are some more that we have available to put. We just need to know where it seems that there is a need
for it.”
Chavez said even though there are a lot of recycling containers on campus, a lot of the items cannot be recycled because they get cross-contaminated and have to be thrown in the trash.
“As far as recycling containers with plastic and papers, one of the things that we have been experiencing … is that when we are trying to recycle papers, plastics and cans, is that some of the items get cross-contaminated and when that happens, whatever it is in that bin actually becomes trash because the city will not get it from us like that; they will reject it,” he said.
Chavez said sometimes food is thrown in the recycling bins, so everything in there is considered trash and thrown away.
He said the university needs students to help by putting trash, plastic and papers in the designated containers.
“I don’t think [students] know that when it is cross-contaminated we are not able to recycle anymore,” he said. “It becomes, like I said, regular trash. We need to educate our students to help us be part of the solution for recycling.”
The Edinburg campus has recycling containers on the first floor of every building, as well as outside.
“[The ones outside] are actually very expensive units that we have because they compact whatever you throw in there,” Chavez said. “There is one on the north side of the library, there is one on the northwest of the Science Building, there is one on the north side of the Engineering [Building] and there is two in the Student Union: one on the northeast and one on the south of the building.”
