Harvard’s Game-Day Recycling Wins Award

Harvard’s green efforts at the Harvard vs. Princeton football game in October landed it in third place in the 2009 Game Day Challenge sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, marking a growing partnership between the athletics center and sustainability advocates at Harvard.

The pilot EPA competition measured various aspects of the Universities’ green efforts at the athletic game of their choosing.

Harvard, which represented the Ivy League, took first place in the Per Capita Recycling competition, just edging out the University of Colorado and Ohio University.

“Overall, I am really happy with how it turned out,” said Alyssa H. Devlin ’11, a representative of the Athletics Eco Resource Efficiency Program who also helped to lead the project.

Devlin led the collaborative effort among House Eco representatives to pass out blue and black trash bags to tailgaters at the October football game and increase awareness about Harvard’s sustainability efforts. “A lot of people at the tailgate know that we are here to recycle, so now they expect us,” she said.

Though the Game Day Challenge was not athletic, it spurred athletic spirit among some, including Robert Gogan, a leader in the project and a recycling manager for the University’s Facilities Maintenance Operations.

“This is a gratifying step forward—getting a kick out of beating Ohio University,” he said, referring to Ohio’s loss to Harvard in the Per Capital Recycling category of the challenge. He noted that Ohio University had defeated Harvard in a previous recycling competition. “We felt like underdogs to them ever since,” Gogan said. “Next year, if Yale signs up, I look forward to being happy that we beat [them].”

Despite the hype among sustainability advocates, Devlin says that visibility among the larger student population is the most challenging aspect of the recycling efforts. “The hardest thing is getting students to know what is going on,” she said. But, as one of the only student leaders on the competition’s team, Devlin called the Game Day Challenge “one step toward raising awareness.”

According to Gogan, sustainability advocates face a slew of challenges including bringing concession operators and an outside contractor—Cambridge Landscaping—which the University hired to dispose of waste at games, in line with University-wide recycling efforts.

Still, Devlin called this year’s game a learning experience that caused her to realize that “there are a lot of structural things that need to get done first,” in order to fully integrate recycling into Harvard’s game-day experience.