Students Keep Empties Out of Alberta Landfills, While Helping Others

CALGARY, Nov. 16 /CNW/ - Participants of the second annual on-campus beverage container recycling contest collected just over 327,000 of these empty beverage containers that would have otherwise ended up in our Alberta landfills: A quantity equivalent to saving the use of over 20,000 litres of crude oil.

Students from universities and colleges across Alberta participated in the contest organized once again by Alberta Beverage Container Recycling Corporation to encourage the recycling of empty beverage containers ("empties"). The contest, which ran from September 7 to November 1, 2010 offered a ski weekend or a year of free groceries to the Alberta student or student group with the largest quantity of empties collected and returned to an Alberta Bottle Depot. The contest was part of ABCRC's "Don't Be A Tosser" campaign aimed at encouraging 18- to 25-year-olds to recycle their empty beverage containers.

"Not only did these students contribute to helping our industry reach the government's mandate of achieving an 85% return rate on these containers by the end of 2011," commented Cherie Cohen, VP Communications & Marketing, "It was also really encouraging to see the money raised help not-for-profit organizations. While shifting behaviour has been our number one goal for this campaign, it's great to see so much team work across these efforts."

Second place winner, Priscilla Ristau, a single mother and student at Red Deer College, used the contest to teach her 5-year old daughter about setting goals in addition to the importance of recycling.  With the help of her own classmates, her daughter's dance school, and the small community of Eckville, Ristau and her daughter collected almost $11,000 worth of empty beverage containers.

"The greatest success is that my daughter has now taught several of her friends and class mates about the importance of recycling," said Ristau. "It's our children who will ultimately be left with the planet we are all working so hard to destroy - we all need to do our part to preserve what we have."

Ristau's efforts alone kept over 100,000 containers out of landfill, translating into enough money for them to take a much needed trip to Disneyworld, and also won them free groceries for a year from Canadian Superstore.

The recycling efforts of contest participants also had an impact on a global scale.  After learning that the estimated recovery period of containers that end up in landfill, amounts to several decades, a club for international students from the King's University College in Edmonton got together and raised close to $400 dollars for the Pakistan flood relief as many of the club's members had families residing in Pakistan that were victims of the disaster.

The winner of the contest, Amanda MacPherson, a student at SAIT in Calgary, collected an unbelievable $12,453 worth of empties "It was a real group effort and educational experience at the same time," said MacPherson. "I have always been an avid recycler but this contest drove me to make that extra effort to be more proactive about it."

Don't Be A Tosser: Some Facts About Your Empties 

• Glass takes over one million years to decompose in our landfills and dumps. For plastics it can take up to 400 years, and for aluminium cans its 80-100 years.
• Recycling one aluminum can save enough energy to run your TV for three hours.
• 3,178 recycled two-litre PET plastic bottles saves one cubic metre of landfill space. (not sure this means much to people?)

About ABCRC

ABCRC is a provincially incorporated not-for-profit product stewardship corporation. Their mandate is to be the agent for the beverage manufacturers to operate a common collection system for registered containers, to be responsible for recycling beverage containers, to comply with regulation and BCMB by-laws, and to promote the economic and efficient collection of beverage containers.

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