Veritas, Vol. 31, No. 02, September 15, 1990

              “Recycle It!”: A University-wide effort to save the environment
“Every week we generate 500,000 tons of garbage — enough to fill the Orange Bowl every three weeks. Stacked on top of each other, the 16 billion disposable diapers we use each year would be 252,000 miles high. For each ton of paper we recycle, we save 17 trees and 42 gallons of gas.”
Conrad Mea, trucking and moving manager for the University’s ARA Services, gives out fact after fact about recycling as though he’s repeated them many times. And he probably has.
What started as an assignment for Mea — to help organize and implement a recycling program at UM — has become a passion. Now he wants all University employees and students to know the importance of recycling and encourages them to participate in the successful paper recycling program as well as the month-old aluminum recycling effort.
Since it was created one year ago, the University’s “Recycle It!” program has generated more than
90,000 pounds of paper — and more than $2,600 from the effort, which goes to the individual departments that are participating.
“It’s just wonderful,” says Joyce Galya, director of the University of Miami Citizens Board, who came up with the idea for the program.
“It shows that UM people really care about their environment, their community, and their future.”
Galya, who stressed that she is “not an environmental activist — only a concerned citizen,” got the impetus when she spotted a landfill mountain of garbage sitting next to Black Point Marina in South Dade. “It disgusted me to see it. Our forefathers were remiss — dumping garbage into the ocean, polluting our once beautiful lakes and natural beauty, making great monuments to high technology”
Galya decided to take matters into her own hands. Recycling, she says, “means taking material that is going to be thrown away and using it again as a raw material for
a new product.” She discovered that approximately 40 percent of the University’s waste is office paper.
So following the lead of several banks, universities, and county offices in the area, she planned a program to collect and sell wastepaper on the Coral Gables campus.
But, she says, it was Vic Atherton, assistant vice president for facilities administration, and Conrad Mea, trucking and moving manager for ARA Services, who put the plan into effect and keeps it going.
There are now 40 bins to collect wastepaper on the Coral Gables campus. Employees are asked to put specific types of wastepaper into specially designed “desk top”
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Conrad Mea (left), trucking and moving manager for ARA Services, and Vic Atherton, assistant vice president for facilities administration, are surrounded by receptacles used in the successful recycling program.
Sigmund Freud collection exhibited at Lowe
Fifty years after the death of Sigmund Freud, the Lowe Art Museum is presenting an exhibition of 65 objects drawn from his cherished collection of over 2,000 ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Near Eastern, and Asian artifacts. The Sigmund Freud Antiquities: Fragments from a Buried Past opened on September 6 and will run through September 30.
The exhibition, which is permanently housed at the Freud Museum in London, is traveling to 13 cities on a two-year tour sponsored by CIBA-GEIGY Pharmaceuticals and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In presenting these objects with which Freud surrounded himself in his famous study and consultation room reveals a side of Freud rarely glimpsed by the outside world.
Among the objects on view are a bronze statue of Athena, which Freud particularly treasured; a Greek terracotta statue of Eros, god of love; an Etruscan two-headed bronze depicting a faun and his female counterpart, a maenad—symbols of impulse and sexuality; and an Egyptian statue of Imhotep, which is associated with the interpretation of dreams. The exhibition also includes prints,
archaeological volumes from his library, and photographs of Freud’s study in Vienna and London.
As a whole, the exhibition gives the viewer not only a feel for the working environment in which Freud developed his theories that revolutionized Western thought, but evokes the excitement of an era during which the social sciences were opening new worlds, both exterior and interior.
Also being exhibited at the Lowe Museum this month are works by University faculty members from the Department of Art and Art History.