ASU scored nearly three times more than UA on Wednesday -- not in football or basketball, but in recycling.
Universities competing in the fourth annual Recycle Mania contest finished their semester-long race to the top of the trash heap Saturday; the final results weren't announced until Wednesday.
In its first year of competition, ASU finished 15th of the 17 colleges involved, with a total of 16.8 pounds of recyclables collected per student, said Andrea Lee, ASU's program coordinator for recycling.
As the contest took into account only students who live on campus, 4,937 students' recyclables were counted.
During the 10 weeks of the contest, each school weighed how many pounds of recyclables came through the residence halls and dining halls. Weyerhaeuser Company, which picks up the trash all over campus, collected ASU's recyclables each Saturday.
"We have increased recycling at the halls tremendously, and we weren't expected to be at the top, so I think we did pretty well overall," Lee said.
UA placed 16th, with a total of 5.77 pounds of recyclables per student, said Debbie Hanson, the project and environmental coordinator for Residential Life at UA. UA has 5,121 on-campus students.
"We really wanted to beat ASU, and I hope we do three times better next year," Hanson said. "It's a really fun rivalry, and we did increase our residence hall recycling as well, so that is good for us."
The winning school was Miami University of Ohio with 57.26 pounds of recyclables per 7,000 on-campus students, said Ed Newman, the contest's coordinator and refuse and recycling manager for Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
Each of the losing schools have to put an ad in their school papers congratulating Miami University of Ohio before the end of the semester, according to Newman.
Newman started the contest at OU in 2001."It's good for the environment to recycle, and it is also better for the economy to figure out better ways to treat waste rather than burying it or burning it," Newman said.
Reach the reporter at annemarie.moody@asu.edu.
