Go Green for Big Red volunteers have made it their mission to divert game-day waste from the landfill. So far, the members have succeeded — recycling nearly three-quarters of the waste at Memorial Stadium in 2013-14.
The recycling initiative was introduced in 2009 when Prabhakar Shrestha, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln sustainability coordinator, saw a need for controlling waste from tailgates and other game-day activities. Every home football game UNL Recycling and several volunteers walk around Memorial Stadium handing out green plastic bags to tailgaters as part of the Go Green for Big Red program.
“There’s just a huge amount of waste at the tailgate parties,” said Brent Johannes, the UNL Recycling coordinator. “That’s what we’re targeting. It’s become an establishment. I imagine in the early days, it was news to all the tailgaters, but now, they all expect it. They know who we are, and it’s usually received pretty well.”
Colton Berck, a second-year recycling coordinator, said the reaction to providing recycling bags has been very positive. The program tries to make recycling as easy as possible, he said. “(The green bags) are really visible, and it’s a nice, symbolic thing to see,” Berck said. “If you’re tailgating, and you don’t have one, and you see all your neighboring tailgaters have it, it’s like … ‘Why am I not doing this? How do I get these?’”
After the game, tailgaters leave the bags in the parking lots for UNL Recycling and volunteers to pick up later. “It’s the easiest possible way to recycle,” Berck said.
The program has enlisted more volunteers each year and hopes to continue growing, according to Berck. “It’s a great way for us to be represented in the community,” he said. “There’s a need for it; there are tons of people on campus who want to recycle. A lot of the things we do are really student-led; we get to the heart of what students want.”
Johannes said that with a 51 percent waste diversion rate in 2015, UNL students have made sustainability a priority. “Those sheer statistics are a pretty big impact,” Johannes said.
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