Why doesn’t UT Knoxville adopt a single stream recycling process?
A. The first reason is that the university generates revenues for recycling paper and cardboard. If recyclables are combined, we would need to pay an outside recycling company to haul these materials from campus. The labor involved in separating it out into anything usable is tremendous, and we don’t have the labor to do it. Additionally, it costs the recycling company a lot of time and labor, and it involves the use of large, expensive equipment. Another reason is that our paper is very clean and high quality, so it gets recycled into other office paper rather than getting ‘downcycled’ into tissue or other low-grade papers that can’t be recycled again. If we combined the other recyclables with the paper, it would go out as a truly mixed paper and get ‘downcycled’. Finally, we have 230 of the three-section recycling bins that are designed for keeping bottles/cans/plastic separate from paper, and so are the hundreds of other bins that have lids designed for either paper or bottles and c
