The LSU Tigers may have missed out on an SEC Championship and national title this past football season, but the university’s staff and fans helped the campus bring home the 2015 GameDay Recycling Challenge title.
LSU led the nation in total recycling this season with 86,400 pounds, and LSU also led the SEC in tons recycled per capita, the university announced this morning.
The GameDay Recycling Challenge annually engages football fans across the country. This year’s challenge pitted 99 colleges and universities against each other in a friendly competition to see which campus could reduce the most gameday waste by increasing recycling.
LSU blew away the competition for total pounds recycled. Clemson University placed second to LSU, with just shy of 68,900 pounds recycled, or about 17,500 pounds less than LSU. “Participating in this challenge builds on our aggressive goal of reaching a 50 percent recycling rate per month consistently for 2015,” says LSU Sustainability Manager Sarah Temple in a prepared statement. “Recycling game day waste, due to the incredible volume, is extremely central to our meeting this objective.”
The only SEC school aside from LSU in the top ten is Texas A&M, which recycled about 31,300 pounds. Together, the participating colleges and universities recycled or reused 2.1 million pounds of bottles, cans, paper, cardboard and other materials, in addition to composting or recovering 457,000 pounds of food organics.
“Diverting these materials from the landfill prevented the release of an estimated 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent,” reads the release from LSU. “This is equivalent to eliminating the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 768 passenger vehicles, or the emissions produced by the annual electricity use of 333 households.”
The GameDay Recycling Challenge is produced through a partnership of the College and University Recycling Coalition, Keep America Beautiful and RecycleMania Inc.
