A majority of the recyclable material on Gator football game days is thrown into the same truck as the trash and sent to the landfill. That’s despite the hundreds of separate bins stationed throughout Ben Hill Griffin Stadium and across campus.
WUFT reporters observed trash and recycling collection after the Oct. 5 home football game between the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida. Workers threw bags full of plastic bottles and metal cans along with bags of trash into the same rear-load garbage truck, resulting in sprays of liquid refuse.
GFL Environmental, Inc. contracts with the University of Florida for waste management. Employees on that game day told WUFT trash and recycling are separated as much as possible, but the recycling collected after games is usually too contaminated to be properly sorted. It mostly ends up in the landfill, they said.
Shawn May, the company’s UF account executive, said in an email that roughly 65% of recycling bags on UF campus on game day are contaminated. That includes what’s collected inside and outside the stadium before, during and after the game.
Saturday football game days average about 11.5 tons of garbage and 1.2 tons of commingled recycling, May wrote. GFL crews return to campus on Sundays to continue cleanup, leading to an average of over seven tons of garbage and about a half-ton of commingled recycling.
GFL Gainesville General Manager Kevin Smith said workers make a spot decision for each recycling bin on whether or not it is too contaminated. He said the contamination threshold needs to be 20% or less. Contamination can be anything from non-recyclable trash or liquid waste to different types of plastic that can’t be recycled together.
Smith said GFL staff are not responsible for determining when a recycling container meets the threshold for contamination; they only load the trucks.
“We don't ourselves sort through the containers,” Smith said. “You look at GFL as a transport company, right? We transport it from the stadium to the actual facility itself.”
Gus Olmos, director of solid waste for Alachua County, said any potentially recyclable item that is mixed with trash when it arrives at Leveda Brown Environmental Park — the county’s waste sorting facility and dump — is considered contaminated.
None of it can be separated or recycled.
The University Athletic Association handles waste inside the stadium, while UF manages everything outside. UAA spokesperson Denver Parler offered a statement via email.
“As part of our commitment to sustainability, the UAA has a Green Team that works on football game days to assist in the separation of recycling and waste throughout the stadium bowl,” the statement read.
Parler did not elaborate on whether the “Green Team” makes the decisions regarding recycling contamination, or provide any specifics of their involvement with recycling on game days.
May said game days maintain an average diversion rate of 18.5%. Diversion means the amount of waste that is kept out of the landfill, whether through recycling, composting or other reduction or reuse methods. He said UF’s game day diversion numbers have dropped slightly over the last few years, but these numbers were “not anything drastic.”
While game days have lower recycling numbers, UF’s overall diversion rate for campus waste for the last five years has been 53%, according to Katie Karwan, UF’s assistant director of facility services. She and Carmen Bruno, recycling and solid waste coordinator, said the university consistently stays above the statewide municipal average, which sits around 50%. UF produces about 20,000 tons of waste per year, according to Karwan.
“Most people just go, ‘Well, we set it at the curb or we put it in the dumpster, and we just want it to go away,’” Bruno said. “We're the land of away.”
Bruno said the university is operating a large waste management operation comparable to some of Florida’s smaller counties. He also said the group constantly has to reeducate people on proper recycling on campus.
“When we talk about what impacts what we do for the amount of material we move, we always have to bear in mind that our population, our core population, changes every four years,” Bruno said. “But we also have to think about all those people that visit and those big events.”
Events like move-in and move-out day, or game days, mean thousands of people unfamiliar with Alachua County descend on the UF campus, each with preconceptions about what is and isn’t recyclable. Karwan also said many items are technically recyclable, but it’s a matter of what your local system is willing and able to accept and process.
“Recycling is commodity driven, so it is a business and someone has to be able to make money on the time and labor and materials and fuel and everything that goes into the processing and the movement of these materials in order for it to continue to happen,” Karwan said.
A 2022 NPR report shows plastic recycling happens much less often than people think. Contamination is a big factor; containers that are wet or have food residue on them can damage machinery and reduce the quality of the recycled material. Additionally, new plastic is cheap and easy to produce, while collecting and sorting old plastic is expensive, leading to only about 5% of plastic actually being recycled into new products nationally.
Overall, Karwan said, recycling has a lot of limitations.
“I would encourage people to actively look at your habits and try to reduce what you're generating in the first place, because that's where we're going to really make a difference,” she said.