Some students throw their newspapers in the trash or on the floor after reading them. But not Adrienne Legath.
"I'm a recycle freak. I get on my friends all the time," Legath (junior-public relations) said.
Legath has good reason for being adamant about recycling: She's a recipient of the Newspaper Readership Trustee Scholarship.
Every day, university employees collect 1.5 tons of recycled newspapers, according to the Penn State Newspaper Readership Program Web site http://www.newspapers.psu.edu.
A portion of the profits from the sale of the recycled paper is donated to the scholarship fund and matched by the newspapers involved in the Readership Program, according to the Web site.
The newspapers involved are the Centre Daily Times, The New York Times and USA Today.
The program has raised more than $74,000 for an endowment since its inception in 2002 -- so much that this year, the program has started a second scholarship fund, Associate Vice President for student affairs Philip Burlingame said.
The Penn State Board of Trustees Matching Scholarship Program contributes 5 percent of the endowment's value every year from tgeneral university funds, Director of Advancement Projects Michael Bezilla said. He said the contribution is intended to match the 5 percent that the endowment is expected to earn on its own through interest.
She also said half of the total profit is invested back into the fund to keep it growing, and the other half is used to fund need-based student scholarships.
Kelly Snyder, director of major gifts, said three scholarship awards, ranging from $1,500 and $2,000, were given this year.
Al Matyasovsky, supervisor of central support services, said the amount of money earned by the sale has increased from $32 to $75 a ton over the course of the program.
The percentage of newspapers on campus that are recycled has also steadily increased to about 61 percent, a figure Matyasovsky called "astronomical." He said a rate of 15 percent was average for other recycling programs.
Burlingame would not comment on how the amount of money earned through recycling compares to the original costs of the newspapers, saying that information was part of a proprietary agreement between the university and the newspaper vendors.
