Believe it or not, Bakersfield College does recycle. Some. The program is not fueled by aggressive student and faculty environmental activists, or longhaired hippies or do-gooders but rather by the maintenance staff on campus who are required to as a result of AB75, a state assembly bill that was passed in 1999.
The bill required “state agencies” to divert the amount of solid waste entering landfills by 25 percent by Jan. 1, 2002 and then 50 percent by Jan. 1, 2004.
Currently the school recycles bales of cardboard and if grounds keepers can find time between their normal duties and picking up student waste they try to sort what they can of recyclable material.
This is a hardly a reasonable effort. BC students and staff need to step up the effort in the arena of recycling beyond what is deemed as necessary to fulfill a state requirement.
Santa Monica College has been building their recycling program for about 15 years. Not only are they recycling the typical materials like paper, plastic and aluminum but they have utilized composting methods as well. One in particular is called vermiculture, which utilizes worms to eat food waste. The excrement, known as “castings,” are then used as organic fertilizer and pest control by the school’s gardeners.
Taking steps toward having a respectable recycling program starts with actually getting trash in the trashcans, not on the ground or on top of a car in the parking lot. Small steps that could be relatively inexpensive would be for instructors to place empty boxes in their offices and classrooms and designate them to be “paper only.” Paper only. For instance, old homework, quizzes, or tests that aren’t good enough to go on the refrigerator, even old copies of The Rip.
Why limit it to just classrooms? Check out the trashcans next to the copy machines in the library. Most of the time there is just “junk copies” that are thrown out. It wouldn’t hurt to set up some paper boxes there either.
There’s no shame in starting small. The next step, following the classroom effort, would be to set up two or three bins in the cafeteria for aluminum cans and plastic and maybe one or two in Campus Center.
Once those are established the school could look into setting up more collection containers at other areas on campus that are prone to waste.
The next step would be for students to put pressure on the SGA to look into creating an assertive and effective recycling program. The SGA’s involvement in the Community College League of California and participation in the Community College Governance, Funding Stabilization, and Student Fee Reduction ballot initiative is commendable but in all actuality, California voters and politicians are going to determine whether or not those issues will become a reality.
We would like to actually see our student representative fees and Campus Center fees be used for more immediate projects like purchasing recycling containers for the school. BC could have a phenomenal recycling program if SGA were to make half the effort they made in creating the Irene Spencer Student Lounge.
We will not, however, place all the burden of responsibility on the SGA because they can only do so much. A recycling program at BC, large or small, would set a great example for the city of Bakersfield. Ultimately, though, such a program would have to be an all-campus effort that would have to yield participation from William Andrews all the way down to the student taking one class a week.