Dear GCC,

As the Recycling Coordinator on Campus I would like to offer you a brief outline of what we are doing to help the Environment. The following information applies to both our Main Campus and the Garfield Campus.

• Everything we throw out is taken to Southland Disposals own Materials Recovery Facility.
  • They sort through each load and pull out all recyclable materials like cans, bottles, paper metal, glass and cardboard.
  • They then take the waste trash to another MRF to go through the materials again to get the most out of each load.
  • We pay an additional 20% to 24% in fees to have our trash sorted like this. They do not reimburse us or offset our costs with the recovered materials.
  • Green waste is also taken to their MRF and the non green items are removed and then the green waste is taken to a mulching facility to be processed and reused.
  • We use a mulching blade on the mowers for the lawns but the all of our green waste that is put into the trash containers for removal is recycled. We don’t mulch on campus any longer as it requires too much of our gardeners time
  • We are required by the State, under AB 75, to recover at least 50% or our trash from the waste stream and we accomplish this through various methods that include
    • The use of electronic forms reduce paper usage and we get credit for the weight in paper we save doing this
    • Our website also provides us credits the same as above
    • We do online registration and get credits
    • We reutilize office equipment when possible
    • We recycle our electronic equipment
    • We use mulching mowers
    • We have replaced our grass field with artificial turf
    • Our tires and oil get recycled
    • We render our grease from the kitchen
    • We sell food used for instruction which allows credits for recycling food as it has dual use

These are the major things we currently do here for our recycling. While this is a low profile approach to recycling it accomplishes a lot in terms of being socially responsible as a large organization. The next time you throw out a recyclable item you can do it knowing you are helping the environment because it is being recycled.

Patrick Shahnazarian
patricks@glendale.edu
Manager of Maintenance and Operations (Interim)