Fermilab community embraces recycling program

Seymour Green (above) is Fermilab's recycling mascot.

Fermilab's latest recycling venture looks set to continue the tradition of award-winning environmentalism.

In its first year involving a majority of the laboratory site, the glass, plastic and metal recycling program has increased steadily.

From January to October, the amount of recycled material in the program rose from 2,000 to 5,000 pounds a month. Although by weight that is less than the 250,000 pounds of paper and card board or the more than 200,000 pounds of electronic recyclables collected annually, it amounts to a significant portion of the less common glass, plastic and metal waste. As the program ages and grows, officials expect to have a better handle on the percentage of waste diverted from landfills.

"I think the lab has done a really good job," said Eric Mieland, Fermilab's recycling coordinator. "Where this type of recycling is available, it has been embraced. People were ready to do it. People are willing to do it."

The program started two years ago in the Village and was expanded this year to encompass 80 percent of the laboratory. Next year, officials plan to include the remaining 20 percent, which is scattered throughout the site in buildings with more diverse waste issues.

The program encompasses recycling from office cubicles, work buildings, Village housing and recreation areas. The program encompasses all the non-paper items that you would recycle at home through your municipal curbside recycling.

Fermilab launched the program as part of its good-neighbor efforts rather than to save money. It costs the laboratory about as much to collect and recycle the material as it would to dispose of it as non-recyclable trash. But the program has an added nonmonetary benefit, Mieland said.

"We are diverting the material from the landfill," he added. "We are being good stewards of the environment."

Officials hope to see the same success with the battery recycling program started last year. A report on that program will become available next November.

-- Tona Kunz

Friendly rivalry

From Nature (editorial),
Nov. 27, 2008

The spirit of collaboration in the race to define the LHC's successor sets an example for large projects.

The future for high-energy physics is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, physicists are eagerly awaiting the insights into the Universe promised by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. But as governments shift their priorities to societal problems, such as climate change, energy, health and the environment, the field as a whole must also face up to the fact that it will be increasingly difficult to secure funds for pure science.

Given this financial uncertainty, it is important that the high-energy physics community does all it can to reduce any internal divisions and to strengthen its external coherence. That is why a new collaboration over what should come after the LHC is to be greeted with enthusiasm. As a new world-class accelerator requires a decade or more of technology development and coalition-building, physicists are already laying their plans. But until the LHC starts providing data, there will be uncertainty over the energy levels at which its successor should operate. So two competing concepts, backed by rival efforts, have been put forward.

On one side is the International Linear Collider, which would use electron-positron collisions to pick up where the proton-proton collisions of the LHC leave off (see Nature 451, 108; 2008). The ILC planners are setting their sights on comparatively low energies - about 500 gigaelectronvolts per beam - a goal that could be achieved fairly easily with technology that is now maturing. The United States, seeking a return to pre-eminence at the high-energy frontier, has been a driving political force for hosting the ILC.

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