Two measly plastic bottle caps.

Lost and alone at the bottom of Sara Burkemper's black 30-gallon garbage bag, those caps were all that was left after the Southeast Missouri State University sophomore removed all the recyclable materials from a week's worth of her garbage. She could see how much she's been wasting.

"I'm definitely much more aware now," Burkemper said as she tossed her deflated bag onto a drastically smaller pile of bags in the center of the patio behind Scully Hall. Before this Thursday morning exercise for her biology class, Burkemper said she only recycled cans. Now she's had an epiphany of sorts.

That was the whole point. That's why biology professor Diane Wood had Burkemper and her 46 classmates in her Biology for Living class save a week's worth of their garbage -- excluding organic material like food waste -- and bring it to Scully. She wanted her students to think about how much garbage they produce and how much of it can be recycled.

"Look at this pile," Wood told her students at the beginning of Thursday's exercise.

Arms outstretched, Wood stood before a 3-foot-tall mountain of more than 25 garbage bags stuffed with refuse.

"Multiply this by about 1,000 and that's how much the city of Cape Girardeau produces in one week," she said.

She then instructed each of the students to grab a bag off the heap and separate the contents into several makeshift recycling bins made out of cardboard U-Haul moving boxes set up around the perimeter. Into those boxes went all aluminum, plastic bottles, paper, cardboard and glass. They were later taken to the city's recycling center.

Some students, like Burkemper, managed to avoid sifting through strange garbage by finding their own bag. Others, like sophomore Joe Class, grabbed the first bag they found.

"You can just imagine how much landfill space and time and effort it would save to recycle this stuff," Class said as he picked out some soda cans and sent them clanking into a box. "There's a lot more garbage that can be recycled than people think."

When the sorting was done, the bags and their remaining contents -- mostly other plastic bags that aren't recycled -- were placed back in the center of the patio. Wood crammed everything into a row of just six bags.

She told the students that even much of the organic material -- like potato skins, orange peels -- that was left out of the exercise can be recycled by turning it into compost and scattering it on the lawn or garden.

"Now the next time you carry that garbage bag to the street, think about how much of that is actually garbage," Wood told her students. "You can make a difference if you make the effort."

trehagen@semissourian.com

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