When students at Grand Valley State University wanted to find out how well they recycled their waste, they jumped into the bins to look for themselves!

In late February, the students of the University took a week to analyse exactly what they were throwing away and how good they all were at recycling – all thanks to an initiative which started on the Holland Meijer Campus.

The idea came about last autumn when students and staff from the University’s Green Team – a group that monitor the environmental impact the organisation have – wondered how the brand new recycling programme — a collaboration with the Holland Rescue Mission — was coming along, said Lisa Miller, spokeswoman for the Holland Meijer Campus.

“We wanted to make sure we were giving them stuff,” Miller said of the partnership through which recycled products provide money and work for the mission’s job-training program.

In order to see how many recyclables were being shipped to the mission and how many were being thrown out, the team decided to go straight to the bins around the campus.  They took out the bags of waste and ripped them open.  According to Miller, what they found in there was rather shocking.

About 85-90 percent of what was put into the bins as waste for the landfill could have been sent away as recyclables.  To combat this, the University made the drastic move of removing all bins from all of the classrooms and offices on the Holland campus.

Within five weeks of going without bins for their waste, the team checked out the contents of their bins again this November.  They found that they had reduced the amount of thrown-out recyclable materials to about 25 percent of what it was before the bin-less plan.

Emily DeLano, a graduate assistant at the Holland Meijer Campus and coordinator of the dives, said the team found that fast food cups, wrappers from confectionary items, paper and drink cans were the items thrown in the waste most often.

Students on the GVSU Allendale campus, USA, this week emptied an eight-cubic-yard waste bin to sort the contents into recycle, compost and landfill piles and came across similar findings.

“We walked away with only two bags of materials that were for the landfill; the rest could have been recycled or composted,” said Cassandra Beach, vice president of the school’s Student Environmental Coalition.

“It’s great. Just as much as Allendale is asking us questions, we’re asking them questions.”

The dumpster dive took place as Grand Valley completes the first full week of Recyclemania, a 10-week, national competition among colleges and universities in America to collect the largest amount of recyclables and the least amount of landfill waste.

Among the Michigan colleges and universities participating in the competition, GVSU was in first place for composting and second place for waste minimization.  During the first week of the competition in 2010, GVSU recycled 27 percent of its waste stream, and this year it’s at 38 percent – highlighting the vast improvement the University has made recently.