Recycling

• The Office of Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), in addition to their other responsibilities, runs the battery and cell phone collection program on campus. They are also available to answer any staff or student questions on waste disposal issues, and provide an online A-Z Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling Guide and other related information available at rmehs.depaul.edu, under the Recycling Program tab.


• DePaul has been actively involved in recycling for in excess of 25 years.  The current practice employs containers around the campuses for the community to "clean sort" recyclables. In addition, vendor "in-plant" sorting extracts certain recyclable products (i.e. plastics, aluminum and glass) out of the general waste stream. The combined results have us recycling an average of 70 to 80 tons of materials on a monthly basis. This does not include the quantity of cardboard product that the food service provider recycles on a bi-weekly basis.


• DePaul purchases recycled paper product and paper product that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and Rainforest Alliance. Recycled product is also being utilized during construction and remodeling projects in the form of recycled plastics toilet partitions and other specialty finish elements.


• Facility Operations continues to partner with Environmental Sciences to help promote better recycling efforts by the students in the residence halls. To better encourage faculty and staff, Facility Operations have placed a significant number of additional recycling bins and containers in university buildings.


• Water bottle refill stations throughout campus reduce the amount of waste from empty bottles.


• DePaul has established numerous battery and cell phone recycling collection points on campus to assist the university community in the proper disposal/recycling of these products.


• DePaul supplements the in-plant sorting with the placement of recycling containers across the campus that help to improve quantities of materials recycled while helping to educate the campus community. $50,000 was recently spent to add even more containers across all buildings.