Feeding off the tradition of corn mazes being a popular
Halloween activity, BYU Recycling has built a Recycle Maze this Halloween for
students to enjoy that also serves a reminder for students to recycle more.
The Recycle Maze has been up all of October and is located
just behind the Ellsworth Building, which is on the corner of 2230 north and
University Avenue in Provo. BYU Recycling has opened the maze up to the public
every Monday night throughout October and will also be open on Halloween night
from 8 to 10 p.m.
“It’s mostly for fun I think, but it also serves to be a
visible and tangible manifestation of what we’re doing with recycling at BYU,” said
Stuart Radford, a sophomore at BYU and a member of BYU Recycling since January.
Radford further explained that many people at BYU will throw
their soda cans or office papers in the recycling bins at BYU, but after that
have no idea what happens to it. By coming to the Recycle Maze, students can
see what happens with the stuff they recycle.
BYU Recycling places blue recycling bins all around campus
in hopes that students will recycle their waste instead of just throwing
everything into the garbage can. BYU Recycling then goes around a collects the
recycled material and compresses it into bales of recycled material. After
doing this, they will ship the bales of recycled material to various plants
that take the material and turn it into products.
With the Recycle Maze, instead of immediately shipping these
bales off to the plants, the BYU Recycling team uses the bales they have
collected and constructs them into a maze. As Radford explained, this year they
started by making a maze design with a computer program. After the design was
set, they spent eight hours constructing the maze with the help of forklifts.
As they gathered more bales of material throughout the month, they added them
to the maze, thus making it on ongoing building project.
“If you don’t think that recycling matters or makes a
difference if you recycle, it obviously does. I mean you can come see at the recycle
maze that if you recycle and if you use those bins that we put all around
campus, you can make a difference and you contribute to helping us reduce waste
and recycle the materials we use here at BYU,” Radford said.
This actually wasn’t the first year that BYU Recycling has
put this Recycle Maze together, but it was the first year that they publicized
it so much. They had a booth setup in the Wilk to advertise and they also
passed out flyers. This led to a fairly large crowd at the maze that built up
throughout the month. Radford estimated around 50 people on the first Monday
and about 300-400 on this most recent Monday.