The University of Arkansas intercollegiate athletics and facilities management departments have instituted a recycling program for all home football and basketball games. While final numbers aren’t yet available, the program has so far produced more the 45 tons of recycled materials, diverting more than a third of the waste stream from Fayetteville area landfills. Five hundred recycling boxes have been provided by Waste Management, Inc. The program will continue through the spring’s Razorback home baseball games.
“In our first year one of the main goals is fan awareness. We want our fans to know that they have a chance to recycle their trash, not just throw it away. This year most of the recycled material has been picked up by our clean-up crews after the fans leave, but with time we expect fans will start noticing and using the green recycling boxes around the stadium and the arena.” — Justin Maland, assistant athletic director for facilities.
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The NY Times reports on the how the city’s diesel vehicles are running on a mixture of B-20 (twenty percent biodiesel, eighty percent conventional diesel) and is collecting cooking oil from city restaurants that once went down the drain in an effort to reduce carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons and particulate pollution. It is something that a whole slew of college campuses have been pioneering across the country:
- UT Austin’s fleet has been running on B-20 since 2001, and in 2005 faculty and students launched an effort to salvage the 6,800 gallons of vegetable oil the Division of Housing and Food Service buys each year. (Story)
- CU-Boulder has been feeding its fleet fried fuels since 2003.
- At State University of New York (SUNY) College of Environmental Science and Forestry, students collect cooking oil to power 17% of campus vehicles. (A full third of campus vehicles run on some sort of “alternative” fuel and the link provides a cool video explanation of the process.)
One possible caution, especially for already foggy San Francisco. Some biofuel mixtures are known to release equal or greater emissions of nitrous oxide.