On the other hand, papers that are discarded with the regular garbage follow a less secure path. The garbage cans in your office and hallways are emptied by custodians and brought to trash dumpsters or compactors at the building's loading dock. From there, trash is emptied into a truck, delivered to a transfer station where it dumped onto the floor with tons of other trash, pushed into a semi-trailer, hauled to a nearby landfill, and dumped onto the open face of the landfill. Only at the end of each day is the waste buried over with a layer of dirt or foam. The paper is never destroyed.
Paper is a very small segment of the material found in our waste.
Office paper sticks out like a sore thumb among the bags of food waste, bathroom waste, laboratory waste, paper cups and coffee grinds. It would be harder to locate a specific sheet of paper among a ton of other papers than among a ton of garbage. There are several ways you can increase the security of paper put in the University's recycling system. You can bring paper down just prior to the emptying of the dumpster by our recycling truck. This way, the paper does not sit around on campus for very long.