Recycling Gone Green & Gold

Sunday February 6th, broke television records in America. Over 111 million viewers tuned into Super Bowl XLV. If you were anywhere in Wisconsin on Sunday, you were most likely one of those viewers. Society places an incredible emphasis on sports and also generates mass amounts of money from them. Why do we not place a similar emphasis on things such as "going green" and raise money to protect the earth? Yelling at people to recycle obviously does not work, so instead why not encourage people to recycle based on things they already like, such as the Packers?

My idea to get our campus more involved in recycling is to jazz up our recycling bins.

We have numerous recycling bins around campus. We have easy access to these resources, but they're not always obvious to us. While walking to class are you more likely to notice a recycle bin in the corner or a Packer's poster? I'm assuming that most people would say the latter.

Advertisements, sports teams, music artists, artwork; all of these things are easy on the eye and will grab the attention of students as they walk from class to class. If students are more drawn to the recycling bin, they are more likely to recycle.

One way to go about this is to start a competition, have students compete to get their design and name on a bin around campus. If that sticks, then we can go bigger by writing into sports teams and such to get their brands on not only recycling bins at UW-L, but at all colleges, institutions, schools, and public places. The key to recycling is making it fun for all ages and interests, and to show the world the art of recycling.