The "Illustrious Recycling Industry" at UVM

       Walk through any college campus and see students on Smartphones, computers, and listening to iPods as they stroll from class to class. Today, that is as normal as Sony Walkmans were in the 90s. So when I go to meet Corey Berman, manager of the Recycling and Solid Waste Department at University of Vermont, I am so accustomed to the sight of everyone on their Apple computers, headphones plugged in and consequently silencing the world around them, that to even think about what this scene would have looked like just ten years ago is difficult. Luckily for me, Corey remembers well.

“Before cellphones, everything was landlines,” he recalls. Corey prefers to call his job “resources recovery.” “The term solid waste is icky, whereas resources recovery tells it the way it is because everything is a resource,” he explains. It is exactly what he deals with on a daily basis, and has been for many years at UVM as he nomadically works on-call, tending to the various places around campus.

            Corey Berman has experienced life during the initial boom of technology and now gets to see its effects in his daily work in “electronic waste” or “e-waste.” “In the 1990s, recycling was ‘it’,” he tells me. When asked about how he found his path in the recycling management business sector, he jokingly calls it his “illustrious recycling industry.” It began many years ago as a work-study student at a small college where it was his job to wheel out large cans from tomato sauce and put them through a crusher to be recycled. This, he says, is where he became “environmentally aware.” After many years of various jobs, both environmental and not, his interest in recycling and other forms of sustainability ultimately led him to apply for the open position that he currently holds at the University of Vermont. It seems that he has found his niche. 

There are 21 depositories found around the University of Vermont campus specifically for “e-waste.” They are convenient tall black or green boxes labeled TechnoTrash, with differing-shaped holes on the front, located in residence halls, academic buildings, and the Davis Student center on campus specifically designed for electronics recycling. Once the cellphone enters the black box, it is dropped from the mind of the former owner and into the hands of the university’s Recycling and Waste Management team.

            There are three processes to take when working with “e-waste” at the university. The most common is, “student waste which is about 85% of the electronics recovered and sent to Good Point Recycle,” he says. He references the Technotrash bins in the Davis Center that are collected by work-study students from the Office of Sustainability. When a deceased cellphone is tossed into the collection bin, it mixes with the computer parts, cords, iPods, and empty print cartridges. “4 or 5 years ago, we didn’t deal with it [“e-waste”], but the times have changed,” he points out. All of the “e-waste” is then carted to a trailer on campus that is collected by a Middlebury-based company called Good Point Recycling.

“Electronics diversion for last year was 25.31 tons, that's about 50,000 lbs., collected for recycling,” Berman says. The average is about 3 tons per month with that number increasing when students are on campus and decreasing over the summer months and during December and January over winter break. The current overall recycling rate at the University of Vermont is just under 44%. That represents the percentage of overall materials that was diverted from the landfill and that is from fiscal year 2012-2013. Not just bottles and cans and paper, but everything else such as food waste and electronics, etc. Once the electronics reach Good Point Recycling, this progressive business then dissects the waste, sorts it, and organizes it into bulk containers to be sold back to companies that will reuse the parts sustainably.

Corey’s enthusiasm for his job is apparent as he tells me about how Vermont is such a special example when it comes to progressive recycling infrastructure, on par with other cities like Boulder, Colorado and San Francisco, California. Over the last ten years, the university has increased by about 200 students a year, yet the amount of waste generated has stayed stable. “Recycling has gradually increased, which is good,” he says, “but ideally you’d see it go down, meaning less products are being used.” It seems as if this type of information would bother Corey, meaning less work for him. “There’s a saying in our office,” Corey says enthusiastically, “that we eventually want to put ourselves out of work.”