Rooting For The Green Team

Colleges aren't just going head to head on the gridiron and basketball court any more. Now, the big rivalry may be in garbage.

In late January, more than 400 institutions across the U.S. kicked off a 10-week competition--RecycleMania--to see which of them is the best at recycling and which is doing the most to cut the waste produced on campus. Students tally up the results each week and post them to RecycleMania's Web site for a bit of bragging rights.

RecycleMania is about half over and the scoreboard leader is Kalamazoo College, in Kalamazoo, Mich., which is first in a combined ranking of source reduction and recycling. North Lake College, a community college in Irving, Texas, is tops currently in waste minimization, while the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has recycled the highest gross tonnage of materials so far. There are four additional challenges in recycling by source material. Medical University of South Carolina is the leader in paper, United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., is shipping out the most corrugated cardboard, Rhode Island School of Design is tops in bottles and cans, and Mills College, a school for women only in Oakland, Calif., is socking away the most food service organics.

Updated results are posted every Friday, and you can check them here.

UNC's Green Communicators

It's not easy to write about the environment. Passion for the subject matter can sometimes get in the way of even the best prose. So it's interesting to see a group of students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill cutting their teeth on both the environment and communication by writing a green blog.

Environmental Blogging is co-authored by students taking Environmental Advocacy, a course taught by a doctoral candidate interested in rhetoric, public culture, environmental communication, and critical-cultural theory. The class itself looks at ways of using oral and written communication to influence others and what it calls "dilemmas of redress" of environmental problems. The course is also offered in a service-learning version in the spring. That allows students to do more than 30 hours of service with an environmentally-oriented group in the surrounding community and participate in advocacy field trips across the state.

UNC runs much of its environmental programs through its Institute For The Environment, which brings together the university's many departments to do interdisciplinary research and education. It offers both a bachelor of arts in environmental studies and a bachelor of science in environmental science. In addition, there is a bachelor of science option through its School of Public Health, which also offers four related master's degrees and a doctorate in environmental sciences and engineering.