Due to SOAR no longer purchasing them, thousands of Cal State Long Beach 2009-10 catalogs landed at the campus Recycling Center.
Students will now be directed to use the online catalog as SOAR will no longer be handing them out to new students.
Rosa Hernandez, director of communications for Forty-Niner Shops, said the University Bookstore was unaware of the change in how curriculum would be dispersed to new students. So, they ordered the normal amount of catalogs and had a surplus at the end of the academic year.
“We usually order about 6,000 to 8,000 catalogs for the university for SOAR,” Hernandez said.
SOAR Director Ken Kelly said that they decided to stop using the paper catalogs a year ago due to the cost, which had increased to $12.50 per book and was becoming a large portion of the $50 SOAR fee. Along with increasing labor and other costs, SOAR needed to make a cut, Kelly said. That and eliminating the paper catalogs was an environmental and student-friendly option.
However, when Kelly realized the University Bookstore had already ordered the 2009-10 catalogs, he tried to use some of them.
“Transfer [students] were the only ones that got the catalogs last year,” Kelly said. “The only reason I did that was because the bookstore had ordered them presuming I would be asking for them, so we helped them out by using the catalogs for transfer workshops.”
Recycling Coordinator Lee Johnson said that six to seven pallets stacked high with the books were brought down from Forty-Niner shops about two weeks ago, making for a “dramatic visual.”
“Typically at the end of the year, there are different departments that will be cleaning things out,” Johnson said. “I don’t believe there were ever that many [catalogs] before. We had pallets and pallets of them.”
Students who work at the Associated Student’s, Inc. Recycling Center said the catalogs came in boxes and had to be moved with a forklift.
Jonathan Diaz, a senior majoring in nutrition, said the students had to move the pallets, unload the boxes of catalogs off of them, and then take the catalogs out of the cardboard boxes and throw them into bins.
The catalogs filled several large paper bins, each of which holds an estimated 800 pounds of paper. Diaz said he and the other recycling center workers counted the number of books in one box, and multiplied that by the number of total boxes to estimate a total of 6,000 catalogs.
“We did our math and counted the number of catalogs in a box and multiplied it by the [number of] boxes,” Diaz said. “We think there were around $100,000 worth of catalogs. They literally just filled up our bins.”
Diaz said they used the $16 retail value, not counting the printing cost, of the catalogs to estimate this number.
Paul Alvarez, a senior illustration major, said the students were so surprised by the sheer number of catalogs that they took photos and posted them on Facebook.
“Our large paper bin was half full,” Alvarez said. “It took us two days to finish loading them. We had a production line set up where we threw them into the bailer.”
Hernandez said it would be difficult to put a dollar value on the amount of money lost, but said that the number of 2010-11 catalogs ordered was reduced to better fit the decreased demand.
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