In its twenty-first year, the recycling program at Penn State Wilkes-Barre has hit the one million pound mark, recycling almost everything from paper and cardboard to metal, glass, and plastic.
Dr. Thomas Winter, Professor of Physics at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, leads this initiative, taking time each morning to sort paper with his wife Janis, a math tutor at Penn State Wilkes-Barre. Approximately twice a semester, faculty, staff, and students spend time on a Sunday afternoon sorting through bottles and cans.
The most crucial step, according to Dr. Winter, is the first step of very simply placing your used paper, bottles, cans and other recyclables into one of the recycling containers all around campus. The maintenance staff at Penn State Wilkes-Barre oversees the collection and transportation of these recycled goods to the recycling building, where it is then sorted into more specific categories.
Once all the materials are sorted into their appropriate categories, they are loaded on trucks and transported to either Bielecki's Recycling Center or Municipal Recovery.
In the past 21 years, the recycling initiative has brought 830 truckloads of material to market and found ways to re-use more then $34,000 in discarded supplies.
For more information, please contact Dr. Thomas Winter at [email protected] or 570-675-9278.