Editor,
I'd like to respond to James Connolly's letter published in the Daily Lobo on Thursday about recycling bins and sustainability.
It's obvious that Connolly was upset by the changes in the location of recycling bins in Northrop Hall.
Yes, the state fire marshal required recycling bins to be removed from the halls, but the recycling department worked diligently with the building coordinator to locate substitute sites to place the bins.
In addition, building occupants were offered the opportunity to use smaller bins in their own rooms. All of the suggested locations were shrugged off by one or more of the building occupants without any offers to help find alternative locations, and no one asked for a smaller, personal bin.
Convenience is a very important factor in recycling success. However, the need to walk from the third floor to the first floor to put materials in a recycling bin scarcely seems to qualify as being a situation where it is "much more difficult to successfully recycle in our building."
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There are two recycling locations in the building with multiple bins available in each - one is hiding in an open student lounge room and one is outside the south entrance to the building.
Connolly is wrong in saying "numerous other buildings on campus have eliminated recycling bins completely." Those other building occupants had enough desire to continue recycling that, when challenged by the same situation as at Northrop, they found places to relocate their bins.
If they couldn't find places for large bins, they were able to find places to put a larger number of medium-size bins to achieve the same result.
Connolly is wrong about staffing under the UNM recycling program and is wrong about what happens to the material collected. The program is fully staffed and is perfectly capable of providing service to the campus, as it is now.
However, the department is underfunded and has very limited capacity to provide additional service in future. It is extremely offensive to suggest that UNM recycling is engaging in deceptive practices with respect to what we pick up.
Visitors are always welcome to contact me to make an appointment to tour our facility. I do not agree that moving recycling bins is necessarily equal to a failure of sustainability at UNM. Or does every activity under the sustainability effort have to be spelled out on the UNM Web site?
In her letter published in the Daily Lobo on Tuesday, Mary Vosevich mentioned the Sustainability Task Force created by the provost last year. One of the activities suggested by the task force was to create a Web site that would pull together available campus sustainability information. I believe this will be done after a sustainability policy is adopted by the
University.
Linda McCormick
UNM resource conservation manager
