Marquette University makes its students think, but when it comes to recycling they’ve made it a no-brainer.

“You don’t have to think anymore, as funny as that sounds,” said Mike Whittow, Marquette’s sustainability officer.

On Aug. 31, Marquette began single-stream recycling, a process that allows students to put all recyclables in one container instead of separating them into multiple bins.

“[Before the switch] you had to figure out does this go in this bin, or this bin or this bin,” Whittow said.  “It wasn’t simple enough.”

Students and staff told the Sustainably Task Force, which encourages the implementation of sustainable practices on campus, that the university needed to make it easier to recycle, he said.

When Marquette’s contract with its waste contractor, Veolia Environmental Services, came up for renewal, the university decided single-stream recycling was a service Veolia would have to provide, Whittow said. Not many waste contractors provided single-stream recycling services until recently. And because of Marquette’s five-year contract, the university couldn’t have implemented it any sooner.

Students for an Environmentally Active Campus randomly surveyed students about sustainability and recycling, said Casey Lembke, student director of the Sustainability Task Force’s Recycling Workgroup and a member of SEAC. The group discovered that a lot of people did not know Marquette recycles, he said, adding that he hoped this won’t be a problem anymore.

The myth that Marquette’s doesn’t recycle resulted from the recycling system that was previously in place, Whittow said. If there was a soda can in the wrong recycling container, it would contaminate everything in the bin, making it all garbage, he said

The main highlights of the new system include allowing all recyclables to be placed one bin, recycling plastic types one through seven instead of just one and two, and recycling plastic bottle tops, according to Marquette’s sustainability Web site. Whittow said 90 percent of plastics used on campus are now recyclable.

One of the benefits of single-stream recycling is that more kinds of plastics can be recycled, said Victor Soto, SEAC executive board member. Students don’t notice the number of their plastic when they recycle it, he said. The number can be found at the bottom of plastic products inside the recycle symbol.

“When students realize it’s really not that difficult to recycle, they’ll think twice about it,” Soto said.

With the new system, the university hopes to increase its recycling rate to 30 percent by 2011, Whittow said. Marquette’s latest recycling rate was 19 percent, he said.

Students used to have to find one of the approximately 150 recycling stations spread throughout campus if they wanted to recycle a can or bottle, according to the Web site.

A downside to single-stream recycling is the cost, Lembke said. The program is a little more expensive but it saves money in the end. It costs twice as much to put recyclables in the landfill than to recycle them, he said. Another negative of single-stream is if there are a large number of unclean recyclables, the chances of them being reused is not good, said Soto

People need to rinse out their recyclables before recycling them and many people don’t know that, he said.

“It doesn’t take that long to think about it and clean it,” he said.