As the concerns of pollution and global warming become ever-prevalent, it is becoming more important to take steps to reduce our carbon footprint. Biology and chemistry major Brook Bignell is working towards helping Lakeland University to reduce its impact on the environment.

Bignell’s senior honors project is “Thinking Green,” a three-part process that involves improving the campus’ recycling. Her goal is to improve existing green options available on campus, provide educational materials on recycling, and promote reusable options at the Daily Grind. Her main focus is on distributing recycling bins with stickers on what can and cannot be recycled across campus.

Bignell is not the only one who is helping to make this a possibility. Members of the Student Government Organization formed a Recycling Committee consisting of Bignell, junior business and math major Matt Seider, junior graphic design and marketing major Emma Schad, and graduate business and computer science major Nate Cooper.

Currently, there are recycling bins across campus in the academic buildings, but some residence halls are without these bins. The committee currently has 56 small recycling bins for individual rooms that were provided by Housekeeping and Lakeland University. However, they are not enough to cover every dorm across campus. While this may seem like an easy fix, these bins are expensive.

“To place recycling bins in the dorms in all the traditional residence halls, it will cost anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000,” Bignell said. “This doesn’t even include the apartments.”

To procure the bins, Lakeland is including this expense into their budget for the 2019-2020 school year.

Along with supplying recycling bins for the residence halls, Bignell is pushing to improve the educational materials on recycling for students. After some debate with Bignell, Lakeland agreed to set-up a tab on the Lakeland Today website that will direct students to a page on my.lakeland that will provide students with information on recycling, such as what can and cannot be recycled. These updates should be done by Undergraduate Research Day.

The Recycling Committee can be contacted at [email protected].