Two cans stand in front of you: a blue bin and a green bin. The green bin is for recycling, a common misconception for students according to Jennifer Ellis, the environmental compliance and sustainability manager for the Office of Sustainability.
To dissipate any misconceptions about recycling, Boise State’s newest recycling program calls on student volunteers to recycle at home football games. Two departments, the Office of Sustainability and the Division of Finance and Operations, work together to bring the Green Games program to life.
“Green Games gives Boise State students and community members a hands-on way to support sustainability at football games,” Ellis said.
During the Broncos’ football game against Memphis, student volunteers were behind the scenes sorting through trash and spotting recyclable materials at the Bronco Bash event put on by the Alumni and Friends Center.
“People don’t know, ‘What do I recycle? What do I throw in the trash?’,” said Environmental Science major Chandler Wolf, a Green Games volunteer. “We were just going and taking stuff out of the trash and putting it in the recycling — that was pretty cool.”
After the game ended, students spread out across Albertsons Stadium with gloves, trash bags and trash pickers provided by the Office of Sustainability, breaking a sweat as they flexed their recycling prowess.
“Everyone filed out and then we went row after row, just beer cans and water bottles everywhere on the floor,” Wolf said. “We started picking up cans, dumping out liquids and we got through one section of the stadium after two and a half hours.”
Turning a university past-time into a chance for change, student volunteers seeing firsthand the amount of cans and bottles left by thousands of peers and community members is crucial to teaching basic waste management.
“[Football games are] a visible opportunity to practice those principles,” Ellis said. “We know that large events can generate a significant amount of waste, and we want to better understand what is happening in those environments to identify opportunities to improve our processes.”
During a students’ volunteer time, waste is emptied of any contents and thrown away into bags. Volunteers dump the bag and commingle the recyclables in the dumpster, learning the various rules on how various recyclables are repurposed once it’s sent to a Material Recovery Facility.
“In the realm of possibilities in the world, everything is recyclable,” Ellis stated. “…recycling is localized — if you can’t afford to collect, sort or sell it, then it’s not recyclable.”
The program encourages the community to be proactive in understanding small-gestures of throwing a coffee cup or cardboard box in the right bin.
“[Students] want to beautify their campus. It’s a circular feeling and effect,” Ellis said. “They really like to see the weight of the items that we’ve collected before we put them properly in the dumpster — they love seeing that number.”
The Office of Sustainability’s mighty team of two, Ellis and Sustainability Director Amy Parrish, couldn’t pull this off without student volunteers. Over the four basketball-focused Green Games starting earlier this year, 43 students volunteered.
“I genuinely like cleaning up the environment,” Wolf emphasized. “Going forward, I’m definitely going to be self-aware about [recycling], to do my part for the environment.”
Students can volunteer for the Green Games at every home football game, with start-times and meet-up locations varying depending by game. To register, students must use Campus Groups to reserve their spot.
“Every opportunity we can put waste in the right place… is always important,” Ellis said. That’s a plus for Boise State and it’s a plus for the City of Boise.”
