By: Stacey Kaiser
s.kaiser@krdo.com

COLORADO SPRINGS - A mountain of trash at Colorado College turned heads and noses Thursday.  The event was a kick-off for Recyclemania, a nationwide recycling competition among different colleges. 

The flagpole on Worner Quad is being called "Trash Peak".  It is surrounded by one day's worth of trash from the dorms and administrative buildings at Colorado College.  Volunteers went through some of that trash to pick out all of the items that can be recycled. 

"This is kind of just a big visual to demonstrate how much waste we produce and hopefully with this placed audit, we will be able to show that a great portion of this will be able to be recycled if people were more conscious," said CC student Sophie Glass.  According to EnAct, a student environmental group at CC, 70% of trash is recyclable, but the United States only recycles 32% of its waste. 

"As landfills are getting filled and they need to travel further, the cost of trash is going way up.  So if we could reuse and recycle it, that will actually decrease price in the long run," said Glass.  On CC campus, there are recycle bins inside buildings, and they are working to get the bins outside.  As for the rest of us, there are recycle drop offs.  Also almost every trash company will pick up your recycling for a small fee.