2017 GameDay Recycling Challenge Total Recycling Rate Winners

In fall 2017, 70 schools from around the U.S. tackled waste diversion via the 2017 GameDay Recycling Challenge, a nationwide competition that challenges universities to increase their recycling and composting efforts during home football games.

Hosted by the College and University Recycling Coalition, RecycleMania, Keep America Beautiful and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WasteWise, the challenge requires participating universities to track and report recycling, compost and attendance data for at least one home football game.

During the challenge, the participating schools recycled more than 1.5 million pounds of bottles, cans, paper, cardboard and other materials and composted or recovered more than 540,000 pounds of organic materials.

Clemson University was the national champion in the Total Recycling category, with 98,521 pounds of material recycled, composted or donated.

“Clemson set the bar high with last year’s GameDay Recycling Challenge, so beating our 2016 recycling numbers was both challenging and exciting,” said Clemson University Recycling Manager Dave VanDeventer in a statement. “Participating in the competition is a way to push ourselves, and we are proud of how we improved upon last year’s system; we were able to decrease our labor hours and still increase our recycling rate. We would not have been able to achieve our GameDay recycling goals without the hard work of the recycling team and the support of the Clemson community.”

To view the 2017 GameDay Recycling Challenge total recycling rate winners, flip through this gallery. To view the 2017 GameDay Recycling Challenge diversion rate winners, click here.