TCU boasts ten colleges and schools with over 100 majors and more than 400 campus organizations, each of which is permitted to produce yard signs.
“The only form of physical marketing allowed is yard signs,” Charity Ketu, junior and vice president of SGA, said. “That means every single department on campus, not only student orgs, produce yard signs, right?”
In partnership with Mark Sayegh of One Shade Greener, TCU’s sustainability club, SGA recently announced an initiative to recycle these signs.
Ketu said she quickly realized the initiative would not succeed without the help of TCU’s landscaping and grounds crew.
Before the partnership, Erik Trevino, director of landscaping and grounds, said the signs often caused problems.
“It does affect the grounds team because we have to mow around them,” he said. “We have to service around them. So, what my directive has always been to the teams out there has been if the date is expired, then remove the signs. Throw the sign in the trash, and the stake, which is made of metal, if it’s not bent, we give it back to the sign shop to reuse.”
However, the idea that SGA could facilitate a partnership with TCU grounds and a local recycling plant cannot be credited to Trevino, Ketu or Sayegh.
Back in the 2020-2021 school year, Drew Stewart, the SGA director of sustainability at the time, had the idea to increase TCU’s recycling initiatives. Then, Stewart collected the signs himself and drove them to be recycled.
“I’m thrilled to see this initiative come to life,” he said. “My goal was to divert usable resources from the landfill and challenge the TCU community to think outside the box when identifying additional opportunities for recycling.”
Stewart’s passion for sustainability didn’t end after he graduated. Now, he is the sustainability coordinator at the Orion Amphitheater, a zero-waste concert venue in Huntsville, Ala. He said he was glad to see sustainability becoming a more relevant issue at TCU.
After Stewart’s graduation in 2021, Sayegh arrived in the fall of 2022. He started and expanded One Shade Greener at TCU and across six chapters.
When Sayegh and Ketu realized they needed more help, Trevino and AP&J, a local recycling plant, joined the initiative.
As described in a recent Instagram reel posted by SGA and others, the goal is for organizations to take their expired yard signs to the SGA offices, where the stakes and the signs are separated into their designated receptacles. Then, Trevino and TCU grounds crew facilitate the AP&J pick-up. SGA and OSG volunteers will also periodically sweep the campus for expired or weathered signs.
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“It’s helpful to not only saving the earth because we’re reusing and recycling things rather than just throwing them in the landfill, but it also helps my team because we’re not having to go and decide what signs are expired and not and waiting until they look bad to remove them,” Trevino said.
He said that metal is one of the most valuable recycled materials due to the ease by which it can be melted down and turned into new metal. The signs themselves, however, are made of coroplast, meaning they might not be accepted by recycling plants.
“What this group is doing with the yard sign initiative is they’re sorting these signs out,” Trevino said. “So, this one product, coroplast, is not super valuable when it’s mixed, but when it’s sorted like it is — which I say sorted because the only thing that’s gonna be inside those recycling loads is gonna be this one product or this one type of material — it’s easy to create new material out of that.”
Promoting campus sustainability as well as campus beautification, Ketu’s goal is that this project would extend beyond her tenure as SGA vice president.
