The Recyclers

In August, when thousands of Duke students moved into their residence halls, they brought with them a mountain of cardboard. Holding a few items of value between six flat sides and twelve straight edges, the individual boxes were soon emptied of their contents, flattened into various states of disarray and collected into a pile next to the warehouse at 117 South Buchanan Boulevard.

Like natural mountains, this cardboard one will slowly erode with time, but Arwen Buchholz would like to see this happen at a faster rate. As Duke University’s recycling and waste reduction coordinator, Arwen oversees and publicizes all of the University’s recycling efforts, so it is her job to make sure that the mountain disappears and eventually becomes something else.

In nearly five years of working at Duke Recycles, Arwen has never been ashamed of managing other people’s waste.

“I’ve always been interested in resources,” she says. “How they’re used, what they’re used for and where they’re going.”

Arwen is a short woman with blonde hair, thick-rimmed glasses and a nose stud. On a Friday afternoon in October, she wears a blue scarf and a flowing brown skirt that reaches the ground. Her boss, Superintendent of Grounds Maintenance David Bryant, asks her about recycling pick-ups with the cool precision of a general planning an attack. The upcoming weekend poses a particular challenge due to back-to-back athletic events. Basketball season starts Friday night, and the football team plays at home Saturday afternoon. During these events, spectators will consume a variety of concessions, and if they dispose properly of their waste, every cup, bottle and can will end up in the custody of Duke Recycles.

The rest of Arwen’s day is full of meetings, and she invites me to tag along. Fridays, she keeps a busy schedule because for the past few months, she has only been coming in to work one day a week. The rest of her time, she works from home and takes care of her 10-month-old daughter, Livia. Not Olivia, just Livia. Arwen gave her daughter a name almost as unique as her own.

Arwen summarizes the origins of her name with a single word, “Tolkien.” Arwen is the name of the elf princess in The Lord of the Rings.

Though she was born as Jennifer Arwen Evenstar Carter, people have always called her Arwen. After getting married, she officially changed her name to Arwen Evenstar Carter Buchholz. Why such an offbeat name? Again, her answer is concise: “Because my parents were hippies!”

“Real permanent change doesn’t happen through incentives,” she tells me. “Permanent change only happens when it makes sense for a society…. If it’s easier to recycle something than throw it away, people are going to recycle.”

Putting these ideas into practice requires being involved in the process as early as possible. Arwen often meets with architects before construction actually begins.

The Friedl Building, which was renovated four years ago, does not have recycling bins. Now, Susan Ryman, administrative business manager for Friedl, wants to know where she can add them.

“It’s really good when buildings call me and want to talk, because things change,” says Arwen.

They sit in Susan’s office and spend a long time discussing the options. How big will the containers be? What design will fit best with the renovations? How many recycling areas will they need? Arwen suggests a set of centralized recycling stations, one on each floor, where staff and faculty can empty out smaller bins from their individual offices. Then Arwen takes Susan and her colleague to scout out some potential locations.

“Let’s walk through, and you can give me your wishlist,” says Arwen.

The three of them walk up and down the hallway, check out some temporary bins near the printer, and then gather around an empty stretch of wall between the bathrooms and the lactation room. Right now, the only thing occupying that space is a mustard yellow half-cylinder trash can, but Arwen envisions a set of built-in recycling receptacles, with finished wooden cases housing a set of removable plastic bins. Printed signs will inform everyone in the Friedl Building what sort of items they can recycle. Susan and her colleague nod as they stare at the blank wall. I had never realized how much thought went into an action as seemingly simple as throwing away a bottle or can. After the meeting, Arwen explains that one of her favorite parts of her job is talking with people and exchanging ideas. “I don’t get bored, which is amazing,” she says.

More than anything else, however, she appreciates her crew, the people who actually collect the recycling and sort it at the warehouse. By Arwen’s estimate, each of the five crew members handles recycling for more than one million square feet of building space.

“They bust their rumps to get it done,” she says.

I arrive at the warehouse Monday, to talk to the crew. I poke around the mountain of cardboard, which has not changed since Friday afternoon. After a few minutes, a recycler named Sarah Hall pulls up in a big white truck. She is older than Arwen and wears a grey uniform with her name on the front pocket.

Duke Recycles has been around for twenty-two years, and Sarah has worked there for twelve of them. Before that, she did housekeeping, so I ask if a personal predilection for neatness has influenced her choice of jobs.

“I just love to see things clean,” she says. But she denies that this has had any sway over her working life. When it comes to jobs, she has taken the opportunities that were available to her.

Sarah and the other crew members handle more than 1,500 recycling bins, so they split the campus into three routes. Sarah usually covers Route B with her partner Dorothy. But today she is alone, and she needs to do a pick-up at the Law School. We drive past the main entrance and pull up to a loading dock in the back. Sarah tells me about the collection process as she rolls several 96-gallon bins into the back of the truck. She will bring these bins back to the warehouse and sort out any non-recyclables that have been mistakenly added to the mix.

In addition to the bins, there are also some miscellaneous bags that need to go to the warehouse, so I help Sarah toss them from the loading dock. It is kind of fun, but I might feel differently if I had to do it everyday. Still, there is something cathartic about hurling a bag of bottles into a recycling truck. It makes a satisfying plunk when it lands.

Driving the truck is Sarah’s favorite part of the job. “I never envisioned driving a big truck,” she says, “as small as I am.”

She also appreciates the positive environmental impact of her work. “We’re trying to keep recyclable stuff from going into landfills,” she says.

Duke Recycles diverts more than 5,000 tons of recyclables from landfills every year. These materials are part of the 82 million tons—about a third of the country’s solid waste—that get recycled or composted throughout the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the remaining waste gets burned to produce energy, but most of it goes to the landfills.

A landfill is literally a wasteland—an expanse of garbage that will never decompose on any scale appreciable by humans. It is the ultimate dead end for a can, a bottle or a cardboard box. But recycling offers a chance to send waste back into the system. It is a reincarnation of sorts.

Before going to the recycling companies, the waste at Duke is collected into several big bins at the warehouse, I climb a ladder on the side of one of these bins and peek inside. It is basically what I expected, a large container full of bottles and cans, but then I realize that everything is buzzing. There are flies and bees all over the recyclables, sucking sugars from the sticky residue of food and drink. Sarah tells me that these insects have stung her a few times.

“We’re not playin’,” she says. “We’re workin’. It’s a job.”

When I get down from the bin, I ask Sarah about her interactions with the rest of the recycling crew. “We’re like family,” she says. Then she explains that most of them actually are family. Her sister, her niece and her niece’s son are all part of the crew, and there’s only one crew member who is not related to them. Three of them, including Sarah, sing together in a gospel choir called Inspiration. They perform at churches and gatherings around Durham, and sometimes they sing informally during work.

“You may come through and we may be singing gospel,” says Sarah.

When I leave the warehouse, that image sticks in my mind. On a weekday afternoon, workers in grey uniforms could be sorting through mounds of bottles and cans, and with only the recyclables as an audience, they might break into a quiet hymn of praise and salvation.

A few weeks later, I meet Arwen to ask some follow-up questions. Her office is cluttered with papers, gloves and equipment. She motions to the mess and apologizes. “This is me, and this is how I work.”

As someone whose job involves diverting waste from landfills and getting it converted into useful products, Arwen is a natural optimist. She foresees long-term improvement in the recycling practices at Duke.

“Tonnages fluctuate,” she says, “But year-to-year and month-to-month, participation is increasing.”

When I ask her about recycling beyond Duke, Arwen speaks excitedly about the growing prevalence of recycled materials in consumer products. She mentions a floor mat she found at Wal-Mart with a label indicating it was made from recycled tires. She was pleased to see the label, but in her ideal world, recycled materials would be so ubiquitous they wouldn’t even need to be marked.

In this utopia, landfills would be practically obsolete, and simply throwing something away would be unheard of. Rather than our current model, which is based on a one-way track from consumption to disposal, materials would be part of a continuing cycle of use and renewal. This is what Arwen calls a “closed loop.” A minimal amount of new materials would enter the loop and a minimal amount of old materials would exit. Most stuff would just go around and around forever, changing in form but rarely getting discarded.

“What if the only floor mats Wal-Mart offered were made of recycled tires?” Arwen asks. “The end goal is for anything that can be sold, bought and traded to be made from something that is recycled material….Because we have enough stuff.”

Before I leave, I ask Arwen if she has any messages to share with the Duke community.

“Please recycle,” she says. “Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.”

And what about the mountain of cardboard?

Although it has gotten smaller since my last visit, in most years, Arwen tells me, it’s gone within a month. She sheepishly explains that this year, mechanical difficulties with the trucks have caused delays, and her part-time schedule hasn’t helped the process. She assures me that it will be gone soon.

“By Christmas, definitely,” she says.