If each of Stanford’s nearly 33,000 students, faculty, and support staff produced as much trash as the average American, almost 75 tons of trash would be hauled off campus every day.

That’s 100 compact cars worth of ugly, smelly, generally icky garbage.

But thanks to Stanford’s waste management system, over three-fifths of our waste begins a new life in Coke bottles and spiral notebooks instead of languishing in the stinky depths of landfills.

We’re not just doing that because we’re green: California state law mandates that half of all waste must find a home other than landfills. Because of the law, thinking about banana peels is someone’s job.

At Stanford, that’s Julie Muir, Community Relations Manager for Peninsula Sanitary Service Inc (PSSI). Her job is to divert as much waste as possible from 342-acre Newby Island Landfill in Milpitas. Every day, garbage trucks collect waste from on-campus trash bins and make several trips to transport it to the landfill. In hairy South Bay traffic, the drive can take more than an hour.

Landfilling is the simplest part of Stanford’s waste management program, with three easy steps: Collect garbage, compress it, and bury it.

What, no sorting?

“This is really important for students to know,” Muir said. When you dump a coffee cup or plastic bottle into a trash bin, no one picks it out later. Though “dirty material recovery” facilities exist, Newby Island isn’t one of them.

It is, however, one of the few landfills in the country that captures the methane emitted by decomposing trash — helping to keep a powerful greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere while generating energy.

Garbage-stuffed landfills are tightly sealed to prevent leakage. Inside, solid waste slowly decomposes and emits methane gas. If wells are drilled into the landfill, this gas can be extracted and used like other hydrocarbon fuels. For example, some of the methane captured by Newby Island Landfill powers a scrubbing system at the Santa Clara Water Pollution Control plant.

But Muir isn’t sure how efficient such systems are.

“I’ve heard very different numbers — from 20 to 90 percent — on the amount of methane actually captured,” Muir says. “A landfill is an open system, and it can leak in a bazillion million places, so it’s hard to capture it all.”

Reducing the amount of trash that goes to landfills in the first place is simply a much better option. While many members of the Stanford community are conscientious recyclers, Muir says there is plenty of room for improvement.

“I peek in dumpsters on a regular basis and find cardboard, bottles, cans and paper,” Muir says.

If the entire Stanford community made a larger effort to properly recycle, Stanford could whittle down the amount of garbage it landfills from 39 to around 24 percent.

Materials placed in campus recycling bins have a notably shorter initial journey: PSSI’s recycling facility is located right on campus, south of Stanford Stadium. Here, the recyclable materials are sorted. Plastic, metal, glass and paper are carefully separated based on chemical composition. Larger recycling centers may have spiffy fiber optic or wind-based sorting equipment, but at PSSI all sorting is done by hand.

Consider plastic containers. Why do we need to know precisely what a Coke bottle is made of? The first step in recycling plastic is to melt everything down, and all the “2s,” “7s” and “3s” must be heated at slightly different temperatures. One bad bottle could ruin the whole batch.

(An extra bonus of the melting treatment? Any attached paper labels or food residue gets burned off, making recycling plastics a simple “toss ‘n’ go” effort for consumers.)

After processing, these recyclables can replace some of the raw materials obtained through environmentally harmful processes and reduce the energy used to make new products.

A classic example is the aluminum can. To make aluminum, overseas strip-mining operations extract bauxite ore, usually negatively effecting the environment through erosion and habitat destruction. At a refining plant, chemical treatment and a high-voltage electric current process every 100 pounds of ore into about 25 pounds of pure aluminum.

In contrast, the recycling process uses 95 percent less energy to produce the same amount of pure product. A recycled aluminum can may be reprocessed almost indefinitely and will find its way back to store shelves within three months.

PSSI sells its recycled material directly to commercial vendors. Metal merchants buy scrap for their own stock; businesses like Hayward’s Strategic Materials will buy recycled glass for use in fiberglass products.

According to Muir, right now the market in recycled paper is especially hot, with paper mills snapping up reprocessed midterms and old copies of The Daily.

“Paper mills make recipes depending on the product they’re making,” Muir explained. “They mix white paper with magazines or newsprint in a machine like a butter churner.”

Because paper recycling is a water-based process, any greasy food residue contaminates the effort. So while they can recycle the beer cans from Saturday’s frat party, they can’t add the pizza box from your 2am study break.

As of now, this injustice remains unaddressed.