By Anonymous
Recycling is one of many sustainable ways for our environment and in residential buildings, many bins have been placed in the trash/recycling rooms on all floors. Beauty and personal care products are always used by college students that live in residential dorms. In the Piedmont Lobby, Johnson Center, the MIX, and the Student Involvement Office in the Hub, there are boxes that are from a program called TerraCycle (PGF Recipients – Office of Sustainability, n.d.). This recycling program has a variety of boxes available to collect different types of products and reusing those recyclables to create a sustainable packaging from many brands. The specific part of the Patriot Green Fund TerraCycle Waste Boxes, introduced by Dann Sklarew, that was the most interesting was the beauty products boxes.
Putting the beauty and personal care packaging into the waste boxes will help reduce the chance that the recycling ends up in a landfill. It is said that an industry that focuses on skincare can produce over 120 billion units of plastic packaging per year, and out of that amount, 70% of the recycling ends up in the landfill (Naclerio, 2020). TerraCycle Waste boxes would help this problem because they are able to use the recycling products, even the ones that are the hardest to break down and create new sustainable packaging. With the efforts of creating a more sustainable place, they have partnered with many brands to encourage making packaging with recycled materials rather than continuing the trend of plastics (Discover Our Recycling Process, n.d.). Social settings are the residential students that live on the campus and these boxes also prevent plastics from ending up in a landfill creating more pollution in the environment.
To prevent from plastic packaging to not be recycled properly, Mason could continue the project that was created and funded by putting a TerraCycle Zero Waste Box for beauty products on the main floor in each of the residential buildings. Since the status of the project is in progress, the Patriot Green Funding staff could reevaluate the project and put the boxes in each of the residential buildings, along with creating flyers to spread the word about putting the products into the boxes rather than in the plain recycling (PGF Recipients – Office of Sustainability, n.d.).
References
Discover our recycling process. (n.d.). TerraCycle. Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/about-terracycle/our_recycling_process
Naclerio, M. (2020, September 11). Sustainable Beauty | Office of Sustainability. https://sustainability.uconn.edu/2020/09/11/sustainable-beauty/
PGF Recipients – Office of Sustainability. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://green.gmu.edu/patriot-green-fund/pgf-recipients/
TerraCycle. (n.d.). TerraCycle. Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https://www.terracycle.com/en-US
Terracycle-Beauty-225×300.jpg (225×300). (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2022, from https://green.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/Terracycle-Beauty-225×300.jpg
