Recycling at Columbia is complicated. Each campus has different rules that often differ from municipal laws or our hometown laws.

Bwog spoke with Cathy Resler from the office of Environmental Stewardship to find out more. Simply put, Barnard College recycles everything. Columbia’s Morningside campus, however, follows city laws.

The flowcharts often posted near recycling centers are too long and detailed for most people to bother with, and as a result, recyclables are often contaminated with unrecyclable materials.

To simplify your life, we have created a Handy Flowchart Thinger that should answer the constant question, “Can I recycle this?” Beware, this chart is only valid for the main Columbia Campus–not TC, MC, or Lamont-Doherty (click here for a printable black-on-white version):

Click for a large pretty PDF.

“But why,” you ask, “does Columbia only recycle certain materials?” We answer that question after the jump.

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Welcome to the Columbia Olympics. Through this series, Bwog hopes to prepare you for at least some of the events that you will participate in at Columbia. Unlike the real Olympics, no one’s too young, too old, too juiced, or too angry to participate. Since everything must be judged, though, we have included gold medal outcomes at the end of each post.

Protesters. While college students worldwide in general have long been associated with protesting, no school is more famous for its protesters than Columbia. Throughout the last century, many of the biggest stories have centered around protests, or at least the controversies being protested. Many of you have probably dealt with relatives or neighbors who only know Columbia as “that crazy school with all those building takeovers,” and then you have to explain to them over Thanksgiving dinner that you really like the school, and then they say that they wouldn’t go there, and the whole conversation that was going so well gets all awkward. Not that that happened to us…

Anyways, Bwog wants to help by explaining some basic facts about protesting and dealing with protesters. Use the comments to add your own advice.

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Welcome to the Columbia Olympics. Through this series, Bwog hopes to prepare you for at least some of the events that you will participate in at Columbia. Unlike the real Olympics, no one’s too young, too old, too juiced, or too angry to participate. Since everything must be judged, though, we have included gold medal outcomes at the end of each post.

Thanks to the constantly long lines on move-in day, and the rather packed schedule at the start of Orientation Week, many first-years (Columbia-speak for freshmen) no doubt are still contemplating just how to make that special 110 ft. single or half of the 215 sq ft. double their own. How does one turn that whitewashed cell into a new home? Use the comments to add your own advice.

• Decide immediately whether you want to loft your bed or put it on risers. Even if you don’t want the extra space (or can’t leap in and out of a lofted bed), you don’t want to have to rearrange everything later.
• Use every corner and every tabletop of space for bins, refrigerators, etc.
  
• Know how to loft a bed – nobody wants to start their college experience with their father in the hospital with a gash from a falling bed frame.
• If you didn’t loot your local Virgin megastore for cool posters (or are ambivalent about defining your identity so early in the year), a New York subway map looks good on any prison wall (and is actually pretty useful when first adjusting to the city).
  
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