Spearheading the donation effort was Olga Baez, an administrative assistant in Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s residential life office.

“I grew up in the Bronx … It doesn’t make sense for us not to coordinate with different nonprofits to make sure that these items are going to people in need,” said Baez. “We’re supporting the Bronx—we’re supporting different organizations that are able to help people.”

About 30 plastic bags of clothes, enough residential hall items to fill a truck, and several bags of nonperishable items were distributed to six nonprofit organizations across New York City. Lightly used mini fridges were given to high school seniors at the Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology and the Mott Haven Educational Campus. Other donated items include kitchenware, cleaning supplies, bed linens, hangers, shoes, storage containers, mirrors, and microwaves.

In years past, students dropped off clothing donations in Goodwill bins and nonperishable snacks at the end of the academic year. But this year—the third consecutive year that Lincoln Center has hosted a student donation drive—is different.

“This year, we went a little bigger,” Baez said. “We allotted one of the student lounges [in McMahon]for all the items to be donated there. We used one of the student lounges at McKeon as well.”

Some items were shuttled via Ram Van to a homeless shelter for mothers and their children in the Bronx. Others were given to Grad Bag, an organization that gives lightly used residential hall items to incoming first-year college students from low-income households.

Bridge Haven Family Traditional Residence, a transitional shelter for families, was another recipient of the donated household items.

“The goal is for them to move into their own space,” Baez said. “That’s why a lot of the items, like the kitchenware, mirrors, and microwaves, are so useful for them.”

Emaeyak Ekanem, the executive director of Christ Disciples Int’l Ministries, Inc., a church in the Bronx that received some of the donations, said many of the people in the church’s community “don’t have access” to these household items that so many people take for granted.  Fordham’s donation, he said, “helps to further our mission of providing for the needy in the community.”

Queens Court, the three-building complex comprised of St. John’s, St. Robert’s and Bishop’s Halls on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, beat ten other residence halls at Rose Hill and Lincoln Center in the University’s first RecycleMania contest.

The ten-week long national competition wrapped up last week, and when the final numbers were tabulated, Queens Court had recycled both the most paper and cardboard at 35.93 pounds per person, and the most glass, metal and plastic, at 42.22 pounds per person.

McMahon Hall, the lone residence hall at Lincoln Center campus, took home first prize for an achievement of the opposite sort: Residents there generated the least amount of trash generated over all, at 84.15 pounds per person.

This is the first year Fordham participated in the contest, in the informal “Benchmark” division. Rounding out the rest of the results were:

Paper/cardboard:

1. Queens Court: 35.93 pounds per person, or 4,850 pounds total

2. Campbell Hall: 27.51 pounds per person, or 7,570 pounds total

2. Walsh Hall: 26.32 pounds per person, or 10,950 pounds total

Glass/metal/plastic

1. Queens Court: 42.22 pounds per person, or 5,699 pounds total

2. Salice-Conley Hall: 39.13 pounds per person, or 8,765 pounds total

3. Campbell Hall: 38.91 pounds per person, or 8,133 pounds total

Trash

1. McMahon Hall: 84.15 pounds per person, or 74,137 pounds total

2. Loschert Hall: 115.28 pounds per person, or 29,512 pounds total

3. Alumni South: 122.93 pounds per person, or 37,125 pounds total

While the rest of the residence halls were not far behind the leaders, there were some exceptions. Martyr’s Court, for instance, recycled 17.23 pounds of paper and cardboard per person and 22.90 pounds of glass, metal and plastic per person. Those weren’t the lowest numbers for either category—those honors belong to McMahon Hall and Tierney Hall, respectively—but they do help explain another number: 482.11, the number of pounds of trash generated per person there.

Robert Freda, director of the Custodial Services department, said two issues were at play at Martyr’s Court that they would work with the Department of Residential Life to address. Although magnetic signs distributed by RecycleMania were posted around the building, he said student awareness could be improved.

They also need to re-examine the locations of the collection bins in Martyr’s Court. Because some of the closets where trash is collected are not big enough to also accommodate recycling bins, Freda noted that some of the bins had to be placed in lounges instead. That absence of consistency, and not residents’ apathy, was probably the cause of the spike in trash.

“The containers are there for recycling, but we want to make it as easy as we can for students to know where they are,” he said.

All told, the average diversion rate over the past ten weeks for the residence halls was about 22 percent, according to Great Forest, a consulting firm that crunched the numbers for Fordham. So the competition provided a good look at the ratio of trash to recyclables generated overall from the residence halls.

According to statistics compiled weekly, the Rose Hill campus’ Queen’s Court has recycled the most paper and cardboard, at five pounds per person. Nearby Salice-Conley Hall is leading the charge with glass, metal and plastic, at 6.70 pounds per person.

When it comes to keeping trash out of the system though, students at the 10 residence halls in the Bronx have nothing on their Manhattan brethren. Residents of McMahon Hall, which is on the Lincoln Center campus, have generated 9.75 pounds of trash per person.

RecycleMania, an annual contest between colleges around the country to see who can recycle more during an eight-week period, started in 2001 as a competition between Miami University of Ohio and Ohio University, and now features 630 schools.

This is the first year Fordham has participated in the contest, in the informal “Benchmark” division. In both the formal and informal divisions, schools submit weight data for paper, cardboard, cans and bottles, food waste and general trash each week, and are in turn able to see how they measure up against each other.

Since the competition began, a total of 45 tons of material have been collected from Fordham residence halls. The contest runs through April 2, so there is still time left to earn bragging rights as the greenest among them all.

For more information, visit http://www.recyclemania.org/