By Megan Rule | Staff Writer
Baylor sits in 12th place out of 50 schools in the Rinse, Recycle, Repeat campaign and competition to collect and recycle empty beauty containers.
“About half of Americans don’t regularly recycle their shampoo and conditioner bottles or makeup containers,” Richardson freshman Libby Kraemer, team captain for the Baylor team, said. “So Garnier and DoSomething want to keep all of that out of landfills.”
Rinse, Recycle, Repeat is put on by Garnier, DoSomething.org and TerraCycle as a national college competition to educate and motivate young people to recycle beauty empties through the Garnier Beauty Recycling Program, according to a press release.
The goal is to recycle 10 million beauty empties by the end of 2017. Kraemer said that any beauty bottle qualifies as an empty, and Baylor has sent in 27 empties for the campaign.
“I heard Libby talking on the phone, and I knew about it because DoSomething is a site I used for scholarships, and I said I would help her if she needed it,” Surprise, Ariz., freshman Aniefiok Anako said. “What I’m doing is reaching out to other [community leaders] in different dorms and reaching out to companies to put up signs for customers to drop things off.”
The competition started on April 1 and will run until the end of April. Kraemer said all empties must be postmarked to Garnier by April 30 to be counted in the competition. Donations can be made at the blue baskets with yellow signs located in Teal Residential College at the front desk. Kraemer decided to start small and just leave a basket in her dorm and is currently working with Anako to expand locations for drop-offs and gradually cover more of campus.
“First of all, it’s always important to recycle,” Anako said. “I think there are like 10 million bottles of empty bottles that end up in a landfill. They don’t belong there- they can be recycled and used for other things, so I think this campaign is really good.”
Once all the empties are collected, they will be recycled into park benches and trash cans for city parks. The winning school will win a green garden in their local community including some of the recycled trash cans and benches that came from this project. According to the press release, this will give empties a new life where Waco residents can enjoy a comfortable space rather than polluting landfills with the empties.
“It would be really cool for Waco to have one of those,” Kraemer said. “I definitely tell people, ‘Look, here’s an incentive for you to donate besides knowing you did something good.’ It would be really cool to have a community garden since Waco is already so big on community already.”
Since 2011, the Garnier Beauty Recycling Program along with TerraCycle has recycled over eight million empties and turned them into various products for community gardens, according to the press release. Garnier has donated five Green Gardens to cities across the country and plans to donate three more this year, the press release reported.
More information can be found on the DoSomething website or the GarnierUSA website. Students looking to help Kraemer can also reach her at her Baylor-issued email address to support the campaign or donate empties.
“I’m an engineering major, so I’m not necessarily leaning towards environmental aspirations,” Kraemer said. “But no matter what my job is in the engineering field, we have to deal with the earth around us. So it’s been very helpful to me to see how crazy it is that most people don’t recycle this stuff, and we should see if we can.”
