Photo by caseywest on Flickr, licensed by Creative Commons

‘Gone Green’ is NBN’s new column about how to live as a student while helping the environment.

I don’t buy organic underwear, drive a hybrid car, or compost. I color my hair intermittently even though I know the chemicals hurt Momma Earth. And though I’d like to buy all organic food from Whole Foods, food at Jewel costs less and schoolbooks aren’t getting any cheaper. But I always, always, recycle. Correction: I always did.

The first time I didn’t, the guilt was immeasurable. My hand hung there, over the trashcan, loaded like a gun with bullets of glass and plastic. I felt like I was killing a small animal or dumping motor oil straight into the ocean. So I turned my shame into outrage. “What do you mean the building doesn’t have recycling? Why won’t the City of Evanston pick up my recyclables?”

The City of Evanston doesn’t pick up recyclables from apartment buildings because they don’t pick up anything — garbage or recyclables — from multi-family locations and businesses, Suzette Eggleston, the Superintendent of Streets and Sanitation for the City of Evanston explained to me. Property managers are responsible for trash removal and recycling. Some include recyclables pickup, but others don’t. (Mine doesn’t. Jason Foster, a leasing consultant at Evanston Place, tells me that they do, and have been for at least 10 years. He also says that it only costs them $6.25 a month per apartment, a rent hike I’d willingly incur.)

What Evanston does provide for us apartment dwellers is a drop-off location (2222 Oakton St.) where anyone can bring recyclables every Friday (noon-7 p.m.), Saturday and Sunday (8 a.m.-5 p.m.). Eggleston says the center gets a lot of use, though it does require people to transport their own recyclables.

This is the biggest challenge facing college students, especially the ones without cars, says Trey Granger, fulfillment and public relations manager for Earth911.com. It’s especially challenging for students who grew up with access to curbside recycling, he says. “They have to make more of a commitment. It’s not as simple anymore as putting stuff in a recycling bin. They have to go search for it.”

And that’s when I realized I was conveniently green. I recycled because it was always accessible to me. Horrified at my self-revelation and newly determined to care about the environment for “all the right reasons”, I also wondered how many otherwise well-intentioned off-campus students like myself, who had dutifully separated their trash into blue and black bins when they lived in dorms, were now lumping it all together.

Probably many. Which is why volunteers led by SEED pro-recycling chair Steven Pflaum spend Sunday afternoons driving empty beer cans and vodka bottles to landfills while the rest of us sleep off the hangovers caused by said items. The students who started the organization began with reactions like mine when they moved off-campus, and after a series of other attempts, settled on the following system as most efficient: They borrow a school community service van and spend anywhere from one to three hours driving around town to the apartment buildings of students who have e-mailed them to arrange a pickup. The volunteers bring the recyclables to the Evanston drop off center, and repeat the whole thing a week or two later. “A year ago we switched the perspective of what we were doing to the individuals,” said Pflaum, “and since then the program has slowly been building through word of mouth, people who request and people who volunteer.”

Soon the volunteers can start sleeping in on Sundays, because plans are in the works for a commercial franchise to pick up garbage in Evanston and provide recycling containers to all buildings, including multi-family units. That means that when the conversions begin in a few months, Eggleston says, apartment building owners will have to contract the city’s franchise hauler and, as a result, apartment dwellers will have easy access to recycling. The city expects to fully implement the program by April.

In the meantime, I’ll be setting up Sunday pickups with SEED. I’ll also be making a conscious effort to be environmentally aware and responsible even when it’s not convenient. Accountability is key; this is just one of the unanticipated responsibilities of off-campus life. The environmental habits we set now may be with us for life. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recycling just one ton of aluminum cans saves the equivalent of 1,655 gallons of gasoline. How far could you drive on the cans you threw out after that party last weekend?