An ISU staff member’s efforts to make the campus more clean is seeing that her actions are proving worthwhile.

Gloria Erickson, program assistant for facilities planning and management, became involved with recycling nine years ago in 1994, one year after a group of staff and members of the Graduate Student Senate formed the ISU Recycling Committee and began to investigate white paper recycling.

“I wasn’t involved in the very beginning, but our department was,” Erickson said. “After about a year I became interested and volunteered to help with the group. It kind of developed from there until the point where I finally got it included as part of my job description.”

Now there are blue recycling containers in almost every building on campus. Erickson said these bins have collected an average of 13.2 tons of white paper per month since 1996. That is an average of 159 tons of white paper per year.

“She’s been wonderful,” said Norm Hill, stores and materials manager for ISU central stores. “She’s really taken ownership and moved this along.”

Erickson has also been involved in collecting phone books for recycling.

The first year the phone books were collected, a group of engineering students wanted to build a tower in front of the Memorial Union out of them.

“Their first effort they were going to build this big tower with the phone books and they blocked off the street by the union,” she said. Although they didn’t gather enough phone books to complete the tower, Erickson said the students did learn an important lesson about recycling.

“We realized the benefit of gathering the phone books and recycling them and so we started a program,” she said.

Erickson said the first year the program was in place, the group gathered under three tons of phone books. Last year, 11.9 tons were collected.

One of Erickson’s biggest projects now is newspaper collection. Erickson said the project was started by a student group that pulled together information and did research and then submitted a proposal to Warren Madden, vice president for Business and Finance, who gave them funding to start the program.

“Initially we had bins in 12 buildings on campus and recently [we] have added six more buildings,” Erickson said.

The newspaper collections bins are more expensive than the plastic bins because of the fireproof metal used to construct them, but eventually Erickson said she would like to see the project expanded.

One of Erickson’s more recent projects is working with a student group interested in purchasing a bin. The recycling committee would take over the logistics of operating the bin afterwards.