Cal State Long Beach students are frequenting the Associated Students Recycling Center on campus to gain extra cash in response to the high unemployment rate, high tuition rates, high gas prices and an overall poor economy.
“I commute from Riverside, and gas is killing me right now,” sophomore Jesse Sanchez said. “So, instead of throwing my bottles in the bins on campus, I save them, plus collect the ones from home so I can get some gas money.”
The recycling center began as a donation infrastructure more than 40 years ago. The center generates a lot of volume from students, but the majority of consumers, who exchange recyclables for money, are homeless and under the poverty level, according to Lee Johnson, recycling coordinator.
However, unless it is in massive amounts, recycling does not produce a significant amount of money. In addition to students recycling for environmental reasons, some said they were raised to always recycle and developed a good habit from it.
CSULB student Danielle Carson, who currently lives in the dorms on campus, visited the recycling center for the first time this weekend.
“When I lived at home, I recycled all the time,” Carson said. “My dad likes to make money off it. It’s kind of like a family effort. It’s definitely a great cause, and it’s a good way to make some extra cash.”
CSULB student Ashless Bogdanoff uses the recycling center to help fund her parties.
“My crazy friends and I party a lot, and we have so many cans,” Bogdanoff said. “I realized its beneficial to save them for a weekly beer fund.”
The city states that, if the consumer is turning in more than 50 containers for recycling, their refund is accounted by weight. If the consumer has 50 containers or less, they have the choice to count them out, and their refund is accounted by each individual container.
The recycling center uses large yellow bins, which resemble a cylindrical trash can, in order to sort out all recyclable containers. It is the consumer’s obligation to separate and sort the containers from aluminum, glass and PET plastic, and it is the job of the student employees to weigh or count them.
Ideally, a consumer would accumulate more money if they turned in large amounts of containers and accounted them by weight.
Student employees at the recycling center said students may gain a higher refund if their cans are crushed.
According to Paul Alvarez, a student employee who’s been working at the center for three years, a full yellow bin of non-crushed cans will weigh out to about 6-7 pounds, and a consumer can collect about $9. If the cans are crushed, however, a full yellow bin will weigh out to about 12 pounds, and produce about $20 — almost twice the amount of a bin with non-crushed cans.
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