When the vice-president of Coker Enactus, Matthew (Matty) Tricker, arrived in South Carolina from England to start school at Coker University, he noticed something missing. 

The third-year exercise science student was accustomed to having recycling bins readily available.

“It’s a natural habit to separate my recycling,” Tricker said. “But there was nothing; there was nowhere to recycle. So my (recycling) just ended up going in the trash.”

Tricker wanted to change the attitude towards recycling on campus. He brought up conversations about bringing recycling onto campus during the summer of 2023 and leaned on Enactus’s faculty advisor, Dr. Andrew Burkemper, to push the idea along. 

A previous student body president had attempted to promote recycling on campus, Tricker said. But, the project never took off.

This semester, the Coker Enactus’s Green Team had two bins donated by the Hartsville City government to be placed around campus. The City of Hartsville will pick up recycling from the university along their usual route around town. 

Tricker said the biggest challenge with introducing recycling bins on campus will be to ensure people use the containers correctly. 

“There’s always going to be times when people don’t recycle things properly,” Tricker said. “That’s the job of us, as the Green Team, to regularly check them and make sure there’s nothing in (the bins) that has been contaminated.”

The organization has placed a recycling bin outside the Harris E. & Louise H. Deloach Center and one outside Grannis Hall. 

Tricker is looking forward to seeing how useful the recycling bins prove to be for the rest of the semester. If they’re successful, he’s looking forward to building on the original two bins in the spring semester.

“Recycling, for me, is just kind of a habit,” Tricker said. “So I want to make it a habit for other people. Because I think it’s a very simple but effective way to manage your waste for the environment.”