The Biscayne Bay and Modesto Maidique campuses are now littered with bottles to encourage students to recycle.

The Student Government Association and University Custodial Services came together to introduce a new recycling program using bottle-shaped recycling bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

“We want students to use the bins as a way to make the campus much more environmentally friendly,” said David Fonseca, director of environmental affairs for SGA-BBC.

The School of Hospitality Management donated 40 bins from the last South Beach Wine and Food Festival to the University. Twenty-two of those bins are now placed around BBC, and the rest are at MMC.

“The students wanted more recycling bins around the campus,” Fonseca said. “With help from Hospitality, we were able to get the barrels from the food festival as a donation instead of just throwing them away.”

The bottle-shaped recycling bins were free, but SGA-BBC spent $1,500 for “FIU Recycles” bin labels.

The University also received thirty 95-gallon blue bins for BBC as part of a new single-stream recycling program. The program is offered by World Waste Management, the company that collects recycling bins throughout Miami-Dade county.

“Single-stream recycling will make it much easier for students to recycle by allowing them to put everything in one bin,” said Arcesio Rubio, senior supervisor for the UCS' facilities management department.

While the bottle-shaped bins are exclusively for plastic bottles and aluminum cans, students can use the large blue bins located around campus and smaller blue bins in offices and classrooms for all recyclable materials.

Items that can be placed in the large blue bins include aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, glass, paper bags, newspapers and magazines, as well as larger plastic bottles among other items.

For these larger bins, plastic bottles must have a number between one and seven inside the universal recycle logo, which can be found somewhere on the body of the bottle.

“We’ll be putting stickers on the larger blue barrels to help students identify what does and doesn’t belong inside of them,” Rubio said.

Items that shouldn’t go into the recycling bins include plastic bags, leftover food and Styrofoam packaging.

Fonseca and Rubio will speak to incoming freshmen at the orientations about how the program works, and other methods of keeping the campus clean and green.

“By talking to them while they’re still new to the campus, we can probably get them more interested in the program and help support it,” he said.

Jennifer Grimm, environmental coordinator for BBC, believes the green movement will not only help students on campus, but it could have a wider impact when they go home.

“Recycling one aluminum can could save enough energy to power a television for three hours,” she said.

Additional barrels will be placed along the walking trail surrounding the campus.

"It will help by giving North Miami Beach residents a place to recycle, too. We get a lot of walkers there,” Fonseca said.