Living sustainably is something we at Aquinas take pride in. We pursue LEED certification for our new buildings, we found environmental clubs and attend events like PowerShift, and we scatter our campus with recycling bins. This month, we’ve taken to concentrating on those bins more closely with our participation in Recyclemania, an intercollegiate competition designed to encourage recycling on college campuses across the United States. You might have heard the impressive news that Aquinas is currently ranked twenty-second in the country and second in the state, trailing only Kalamazoo College, in recycling pounds per capita. This sounds great, an impressive achievement. And in many ways it is, yet these numbers mask an unresolved question about the meaning of sustainability, namely, consumption itself.

The competition in which Aquinas ranks so highly is named the Per Capita Classic. This is the original competition organized by Recyclemania in 2001. It is the easiest to administer, as it only requires the tracking of the weight of recycled material divided by an estimate of the campus population, so it continues to be Recyclemania’s most popular competition. The trouble with tracking only recycling weight per person is that it ignores the amount of overall consumption. It is not unreasonable to assume that someone who recycles much also consumes more. Though we all must consume to some degree, a better emphasis for Aquinas would be work toward reducing our waste production per person. On that front, Aquinas does very poorly, ranked second to last in the state and 99^th in the country producing about 54 pounds per person per week of waste, recycled or not. But guess who’s last in Michigan? Kalamazoo.

It becomes increasingly clear that our success in weight of recycled material is directly attributed to the overall weight of our consumption. We are congratulating ourselves for being gluttons who know to put a plastic bottle in a green bin rather than the trash. Recyclemania hasn’t encouraged us to change our habits and reduce our consumption. In some ways, it has actually encouraged us to increase our consumption so as to increase the weight of our recycling. The fundamental challenge to all efforts to increase sustainability, whether on our campus and across country, is the human tendency to follow the path of least resistance. We don’t like being told to change our habits, to make the necessary sacrifices that would make a substantive contribution to reducing our waste. Instead, we devise competitions such as Recyclemania, and though its intentions are laudable, it only serves to reinforce our own bad habits. Perhaps it is time to holistically assess our lifestyle and determine where we can consume less. And in the meantime, let’s rank ourselves in the amount of waste we eliminate rather than produce.