Last month, Penn completed its second year in the RecycleMania competition. While the national competition will release results on Friday, by Business Services' calculations, the school did not reach event organizers' goals.
Spanning a 10-week period, the competition works to increase recycling and reduce waste across college campuses nationwide. The competition consists of four smaller competitions: the Grand Champion, Per Capita Classic, Waste Minimization and the Gorilla Prize.
Penn focuses mostly on the Grand Champion competition, which is decided by which school recycles the highest percentage of its waste. This year, Penn aimed to reach a weekly recycling rate of 30 percent.
The unofficial figures from the competition, which may be slightly different from those calculated by RecycleMania officials, show that Penn's weekly recycling rate is 22.72 percent - lower than its goal.
Overall, Penn has made improvements in its performance compared to last year, when the weekly recycling rate after the last week of the competition was 19.26 percent.
Business Services spokeswoman Barbara Lea-Kruger said, "I cannot speculate whether or not we will meet our goal next year, but we are making progress and will continue to do so more quickly next year."
"I think we can at least beat Princeton [University] next year," said director of Dining Services Laurie Cousart. "It's not a goal that far out of our reach."
Besides recycling, RecycleMania also focuses on waste minimization.
"Waste minimization does not get the spotlight recycling does," Lea-Kruger said.
According to Cousart, Penn consistently leads the Ivy League and other peer institutions in generating the lowest number of pounds of waste per person.
"Penn has a cumulative average around 48.29 pounds per person, while Stanford [University], with 111.7 pounds per person, has over twice as much," Cousart added.
She attributed the improvement over last year's results to increased awareness on campus.
"Better education and communication allowed people to get more excited about the competition this year," Cousart said.
She added that the Greek system played a large role in the improvement.
"The fraternities and sororities have been working together across houses to encourage recycling," she said.
Penn Environmental Group co-chairwoman and College sophomore Jenna Stahl said despite the small improvement over last year, Penn has room to improve.
"We did improve compared to last year, but we still haven't met our goal of 30 percent," she said. "Other schools have met their goals and are doing better than us."
"I hope students and faculty members continue recycling until it becomes a normal part of our community's lifestyle," she added.
"People tell me there aren't enough recycling bins around campus and that it can be hard to differentiate between trash and recycling cans," Stahl said. "Penn can improve its results in this competition in the future with more organization and by adopting a stricter recycling policy."
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