DAVID HARDEN/Arizona Daily Wildcat Communications freshman Melissa Eddy tosses a box into a pile of recyclables in the Yuma Residence Hall courtyard. Residence Life is working on a program to pick up recyclables outside the dorms.

Though Residence Life officials said they would work with Facilities Management to haul away recyclables students collect in dorms, recycling coordinators have said recycling in residence halls has not yet begun this year.

The only recycling in the residence halls is being done by the students themselves, who are responsible for collecting the materials and bringing them to nearby recycling centers.

"No halls are recycling yet," said Debbie Hanson, a program coordinator for residence life. "We haven't been able to do anything (about) getting the program together for how we're going to run it this year."

Hanson said she hoped recycling could start as early as next week, but she is still waiting for bins to arrive to be delivered to residence halls.

Student volunteers are responsible for forming a plan to bring aluminum and plastic outside, where facilities management workers will collect them. If they want to recycle any other materials such as paper, they are responsible for bringing them to the recycling centers themselves.

When student volunteers put hall plans together, Residence Life decides whether to approve the plans, director of residence life Jim Van Arsdel said.

"It took us some time, but we were finally able to identify students in the halls interested in pursuing recycling," Van Arsdel said.

However, only five of 17 dorms currently have volunteer chairs, and recycling will not begin at the other dorms unless they get student volunteers.

"Once (the first five dorms) are up and running, we are going to shift to the other dorms to get them up and running," Hanson said.

In the past, Residence Life picked up aluminum and plastic from the residence halls, and left it up to students in the dorms to bring any other materials to the more than 15 neighborhood recycling centers in and around Tucson.

Due to a lack of manpower, Residence Life could not maintain the recycling pickups successfully, Hanson said. However, Facilities Management employees have come in to take over many of the duties Residence Life once had, and said they would pick up aluminum and plastic outside the dorms.

"We were recycling around those areas anyway," Kopach said. "And doing it weekly makes it easier for everyone."

"We do it because it's the right thing to do for the environment," Kopach added.

However, facilities management has so far only collected recyclables put out by the custodial staff, and Kopach could not estimate how much had been collected.

At Yuma Residence Hall, one of the only dorms to already have student volunteers, a huge pile of recyclables was piling up in the courtyard area, said Andrea Coleman, who is on the recycling committee at the hall.

"We've been transporting it ourselves," she said. "(But) we don't have a whole lot of people to transport it. It's kind of an eyesore. It just looks like a big pile of trash."

All money collected from aluminum cans goes back to the individual hall governments, although the number of aluminum cans on campus has continued to decline since the UA signed a contract with Pepsi in 1998, Hanson said.

UA vending machines are stocked with plastic Pepsi bottles. In 1997-1998, the year before the Pepsi contract, the residence halls recycled 6,633 pounds of aluminum and received $3,085.25. That number declined to 796.01 pounds of aluminum in 2001-2002, for a total of $584.12.

This decline in money contributed to less recycling in the dorms, Hanson said.

"It took away the incentive for them to want to recycle because they were getting less and less money," she added.

Student volunteers are not paid for their services, but they can get community service time for their work. Some of the $13,000 recycling budget goes toward wages for the recycling coordinator and covers recycling bins.

Other recycling revenues go toward educational days on campus, such as Earth Day and America Recycles Day, and pay for an appreciation banquet for the student volunteers at the end of the year.