The time has come. Only 2 1/2 weeks left of RecycleMania, and I’m pretty much beat from all the recycling we did coming up to this point.

For those who haven’t seen the hundreds of posters printed on Earth-friendly paper around campus or used one of those fliers to wipe gum off your shoe before throwing it back on the ground, RecycleMania is basically a nationwide competition among universities to see who can recycle most and produce the least non-recyclable waste.

I wouldn’t worry about the non-recyclable waste part too much, though, because if you think about it, everything we consume is either metal, glass, plastic or paper. The only thing I can think of that would qualify as non-recyclable would be food waste, and if you’ve been Downtown in the past few semesters, and seen what passes for thin, you can tell we’re not throwing away much food.

The winner of the competition will be crowned elite and the title will undoubtedly attract many bright motivated minds to this school when making the difficult choice between Binghamton and the Ivy Leagues.

So now all the hard work is almost over, but I think we still need another push toward victory, so I am going to offer some good advice as to how we can succeed and earn our immortal place in history.

1) Buy bottled water. Not only do you help out the bottled water companies, which add insurmountable value to the water we buy, often at a price that’s higher than that of gasoline, but they also care about recycling. They care about customer needs, and after recommendations came out about how we should drink eight cups of water a day, they responded by coming out with convenient 8 oz. bottles. Now you can prove you’re trendy and hip, and not overindulge yourself in those ridiculous oversize 12 oz. bottles. In addition, these miniature bottles leave us more to recycle, which will help up claim victory.

2) Use your printing quota to advertise the competition. We are given 75 pages a week for a reason. We need to go to the Pods and print out more fliers for this wonderful event. But don’t feel bad about using the paper, it’s recycled! Another miracle of recycling: turning yesterday’s garbage into tomorrow’s garbage, after of course it’s thrown out, picked up, taken to a plant, processed, dyed, made back into paper and packaged.

3) Talk to your building supervisor and make sure the recycling truck comes to your dorm. Now, placing all these things in blue bins wouldn’t mean anything if it weren’t picked up and driven to some plant to be sorted and processed. So talk to your building supervisor and make sure you get the recyclable goods garbage truck to come pick up your recyclables. When it comes, you might be bothered by the smoke from the exhaust, but when the carbon monoxide fumes clear, you’ll see that the truck is clearly colored green and has several Earth-friendly symbols on it.

4) Use your frown power. First developed as a way to fight bigotry, we can now use it to fight a new evil: people who waste. Now, this waste shouldn’t be limited to those who don’t recycle, but feel free to frown at people polluting the environment by driving cars, or even those who ask to get their milk put in a bag when they go grocery shopping. We need to remind these people that these behaviors are not acceptable.

These four easy steps can secure our triumph, and we can take our rightful place in their prestigious hall of fame. We must come together these last couple of weeks and prove that we can be just as smug and stuck up about saving the environment as the Ivies!

‘ Branko Blagojevic is a senior management major.