Recycling Saves Money At CSN And At My School

From the LVRJ: "This is one of those stories about unintended consequences.
It is about what can happen when the people at a huge government institution start a program with sincerely good intentions and then, out of nowhere, someone tosses out a figure like $78,000 when no one was talking about that kind of money."..."Brekken said the school estimates the recycling program on the Cheyenne campus alone will save the school $28,000 a year.
Once it gets started at its satellite centers and on the other two campuses -- West Charleston and Henderson should start in a couple of weeks -- the total savings should be about $78,000 a year."
http://www.lvrj.com/news/idealistic-recycling-effort-saves-csn-cold--hard-cash-98302219.html
At the school I teach at, Desert Pines H.S. in Las Vegas, my students, along with myself, basically run the recycling program during the school year. My students, all who have severe cognitive and/or physical disabilities, collect paper and other recyclables from the classrooms and the office. Each year, I think we recycle 20 tons of recyclables or more over the course of the year.
Since we do not use bags or we reuse some speciality bags, we have saved our school hundreds of dollars each year because the school did not have to purchase as many plastic garbage bags. We have also saved saved our school many man hours by taking out so much recyclables and allowing our custodians to do other jobs. Finally, by recycling so much, we have saved money by reducing the number of visits to our school by the regular garbage trucks. The benefit our students receive are numerous including real life work experience, a good work ethic, exercise, socialism (our students are some of the best known students at our school) and the satisfaction they are accomplishing something important.
All the other schools in the district are supposed to have a recycling program in place, so CCSD is saving some money, but if all the other schools in the district adopted what we are doing at Desert Pines, CCSD could save a lot of money, probably tens of thousands of dollars a year and save on man hours as well.