RHINELANDER - The “Green Dean” at Nicolet College is serious about recycling, and she’s not afraid to get a little dirty to prove a point.

Today Brigitte Parsons, the Dean of Trade and Industry at the college donned a hazmat suit, and jumped into one of the schools dumpsters. She was a little disappointed at what she found…

"This is a brand new pad of paper! I can't believe that! That’s unfortunate."

It should have been recycled, but instead it ended up in the trash.

"This is not a finger pointing game, really,” she said, “We’re just trying to raise awareness that's it's just as simple as making a decision between throwing an item in the trash can, or in the recycling bin."

At Nicolet college, it really is that simple. They've gone to a single-stream recycling program that makes it easy to be green.

"You can throw everything in the same bin, doesn’t matter if it's glass, plastic, paper, everything all goes together, and then they take it away and they can separate it out," said Leanne Vigue Miranda, a sustainability leader on campus.

Still the “Green Dean”, is a dumpster diving machine... And she's finding plenty of trash in the dumpster that shouldn't be.

"I'm standing on probably 10-15%, maybe a little bit more of items that definitely can be recycled,” she said.

"If materials are recyclable, you have to recycle them. That's the law, basically," said Miranda.

Parsons adds, "Whether you agree with recycling scientifically or not it's about trying to save what we have going into the landfills, because we don't have an infinite space in landfills for all of this stuff."

By exposing this dirty truth the "Green Dean" hopes students will wake up, smell the trash, and make a greener choice.

Story By: Kailey Burton