News 12 This Morning at 6 o'clock / Thursday, April 21, 2011

AUGUSTA, Ga. --- The Augusta Recycling Facility recycles about 363 tons of material each month, and some say that number could still be higher. A group of students at Augusta State University conducted their first ever waste audit to find their own set of numbers.

It's a dirty job that requires suiting up and putting on protective gloves. Students like senior Matthew Howard dug through piles of trash bags and sorted through your junk to figure out how much trash you are throwing away

"I believe everyone should be concerned about recycling," Howard said. "Especially with things going on in the world now. I mean, we have global warming, and pollution is all over the place. We only get one planet."

ASU's Green Committee is trying to see how many people are actually going green. The chair of the Green Committee on campus, Dr. Clinton Amos, says the only way to do that is to sort through bags of trash and measure the volume.

"Evaluate what percentage of recyclables are going into the garbage, and as we change bin locations or improve them, we can see what changes those effects have," Dr. Amos explained.

"I don't mind getting my hands dirty. It's a little shocking to see so many people throw things away," said Howard.

Try looking through your own trash one of these days. You'll easily find things like paper and plastic bottles. That's a trend Dr. Amos wants to change. He says these things are easily recyclable.

"It's such an easy thing to do, to find the recycle bin. Think about places like gas stations, car washes. Do you ever see recycle bins there?" asked Dr. Amos. "Those are places it would make sense, that is where people are discarding garbage."

Dr. Amos also wants to apply some marketing research to make it easier to throw things in the right bin. "Simple emotional cues can have an impact on people's behavior," he added. So instead of that recycle symbol, you may just see a happy face on a bin next time you're throwing away your plastics.

During the waste audit, students found that 23% of the trash they dug through could have been recycled. Of the recyclable items, 7% were plastics, 2% were aluminum cans, and 14% were paper products.