The efforts of the Nicholls GREEN club and a grant from Keep Louisiana Beautiful, Inc., have resulted in a recycling system for students and faculty.

Associate Professor of Mass Communication and GREEN club advisor, Andrew Simoncelli, applied for a $10,000 grant from Keep Louisiana Beautiful, Inc. to get recycling started on campus.

“The grant is paying for three dumpsters on campus for recycling all materials,” Simoncelli said. “It also gives money to buy personal bins for buildings, so we’re buying three sizes to put around campus in offices and hallways.”

The recycling dumpsters are located behind the student union, next to the tennis courts, and between Ellender and Scholars halls.

Over the summer, SP Recycling, the company that provided Nicholls with dumpsters for paper recycling, discontinued its contract with the University. There was no coordinated recycling on campus at the start of the semester.

Keep Louisiana Beautiful is Louisiana’s anti-litter and community improvement organization that focuses on education, enforcement, awareness and cleanups.

The grant is really just to get recycling started on campus. The money from the funding ends in May.
Simoncelli hopes to show administration how recycling will have taken off. When the grant funding ends, the university will find money in the budget to keep it going.

“The bins are permanent,” Simoncelli said. “The dumpsters are $75 a month per dumpster.”

This means that the University would need $2,700 to continue using the Progressive Waste Solutions dumpsters each year.

Simoncelli explained his idea of reaching cost neutrality and eliminating the need for a few trash dumpsters.
“Hopefully, we can show that it’s worthwhile. My idea is that if the recycling dumpsters fill up, that means we’re putting less stuff in trash dumpsters,” Simoncelli said. “We’re not creating new trash here… It makes sense that if you take X amount out of one pile and put it with the other pile, the first pile will be smaller.”

America Recycles Day is Saturday Nov. 15. The GREEN club hosted Nicholls Recycle Day on Wednesday Nov. 12 to get more students involved.

GREEN is an acronym, which stands for “Go Recycle, End Environmental Neglect.”

Megan Decker, a junior from Gretna, Louisiana majoring in art and president of the GREEN club, has plans to educate other organizations about recycling.

“I’m in the process of creating a PowerPoint to help educate the campus,” Decker said. “We’re going to go to each organization that will have us, and teach them how to recycle, what to recycle and why it is important.”

She explained that the plan is to have recycling bins in all the buildings on campus.

“We’re going to encourage the different departments to empty their own bins. If for some reason they can’t, we’ll try to assign different club members to those buildings,” Decker said.

Simoncelli said, “Every college in the state recycles except Nicholls, and a lot of schools in the state have departments for recycling or for sustainability.”

Simoncelli believes if Nicholls does not utilize the new recycling or if the administration cannot find money in the budget to continue it, then the University isn’t ready to be progressive yet.