As students pack up their dorms and apartments and soak up a bittersweet end to the school year, the waste and recycling companies will remain to clean up what is left behind — a job that has not always been environmentally friendly.

“Let us go back to the years when everything was waste. That has changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” said Luis Franceschi, the south region manager of the United States of Recycling for Republic Services, Inc, one of the country’s largest waste management companies which is responsible for the recycling put in the Feed the Thing receptacles around Champaign.

Franceschi’s assertion agrees with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2009 Municipal Solid Waste Generation Report. According to the report, there was at least a 17 percent increase in recycling of residential waste — and this does not even include commercial waste that was recycled.

In concordance with this national trend, there has been an increasing interest in recycling in the Champaign-Urbana area, especially on the University campus.

Malavika Rajkumar, freshman in Business, said, “People need to realize that recycling is a big deal because it has such a positive potential for the future.”

Community Resources Inc., an Urbana recycling facility, has been providing its services since 1996 to local commercial and residential customers, such as Bromley Hall and Illini Tower (Private Certified Housing at the University), and companies as far away as Wisconsin and Kentucky.

Matt Snyder, the company’s founder and a University alumnus with a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, said that the company will ship out 27,000 tons of recyclables a year at $135 per bale, most of which will go to a paper mill to be made into such items as McDonald’s napkins.

A typical day at Community Resource Inc. will begin before the sun even breaks the horizon. The garbage trucks are sent out to the many receptacles around the area, and they will return to the facility to drop off their load. From there, a skid-steer loader will move the recyclables into a machine that will compress them into a bale that will be automatically bound by thick industrial wire. The whole baling process takes three to four minutes, Snyder said.

The employees work swiftly and efficiently like a well-oiled machine.

No matter their skill, recycling is not always one of the most profitable businesses. One of the largest expenses encountered by recycling companies is sorting the recyclables.

“We need millions of dollars to separate the paper from the plastic from the metals,” Franceschi said. “You have to understand that this is a service. This is costly.”

Franceschi said the business is profitable most of the time, but he also said that Republic Services offers recycling to customers for more than mere economical benefits — the environmental benefits are just as great.

If recycled paper is used, the cost to make new paper is halved, the water used is a third less, and there is a reduction in the amount of trees that must be cut down, he said.

According to Snyder, the costs of recycling can be reduced if people do it properly. He said that oftentimes, people fail to read the directions on recycling receptacles. This causes companies to have to spend more money on the sorting processes, which are already expensive to run.

Snyder said that this is due to educational issues which fall back on the cities that promote recycling programs but don’t teach residents how to use them correctly. He called people’s misuse of recycling receptacles a “well-intended failure to think about proper recycling.”

Franceschi said Republic Services tries to capture as much recyclable waste as possible, but it is impossible to capture it all. Maximizing the captured waste falls on the consumers and the communities need to make conscious decisions about their waste and to be aware of what is actually recyclable.

“We need support from the commissioners and the mayors, and they need to encourage the people to do what is right,” he said.

He added that making recycling a viable alternative to filling landfills, “We have to offer the community different ways to be sustainable with time — to be environmentally conscious.”

Rajkumar said that for her, the convenience of programs like Feed the Thing encourage her to recycle more and be more aware of it.

As an environmentally conscious entrepreneur, Snyder said he wishes people would recycle because it is good, not just because it has been marketed to the people by the “Go Green” campaign, for example.

Snyder said, “You can feel warm and fuzzy about it, but it’s better that you didn’t use more oil to make more plastic.”