LiveGreen: Making a mark without any ink

A few weeks back, LiveGreen held a “defunct writing instrument” collection on campus. Many of you have collection boxes from Terracycle to collect defunct writing instruments, and LiveGreen thought it would be fun to see how many we have collected over the past few years.

LIVEGREEN

by Melanie Stewart

We set up bins at cafeterias, and many of you brought your boxes in. We filled a 60-gallon barrel full of writing utensils that didn’t work or were broken. That’s an impressive amount but doesn’t make for a very good picture.

Enter Anne Rivas. She agreed to use herself as a scale for size as we spread all of these writing utensils on the floor. And to be festive she made a “pen angel.”

All of these pens were sent to be counted and then upcycled or recycled. This shipment contained almost 6,000 items — great job!

To date, UNMC and Nebraska Medicine have collected more than 17,000 writing utensils and diverted them away from the landfill. As part of this process, Terracycle will donate money back to the med center to be used on future LiveGreen projects.

While the “writing utensil brigade” is the only project we are currently involved in, individuals can sign up for their own “brigade” and send them in to support the med center or a variety of other charities. Terracycle has a variety of company partners that help fund the cost to send collection bins and pay for shipping them back, so it’s a win-win-win.

We also have had a lot of questions about pop tabs for the Ronald McDonald House, especially what to do when your pop tab house gets filled up. The answer is to take them to the Ronald McDonald House, which is just east of the Student Life Center on 38th Ave. They have a barrel just inside the door and larger donations can go to the garage.

That said, we thought it would be fun to collect those too, and see how many were out there. We filled up almost half of a recycle bin, but that’s still hard to quantify. Thanks to Mail Services, we were able to weigh out a small amount. Based on this sample, we estimate that we collected a total of 10,800 tabs.

Thanks for all of your efforts to recycle these items. Just remember to reduce and reuse first. Recycling is the last resort.