The football stadium Chuck It recycling program, which will take on a new name in the fall, will also being getting a new logo in the coming months.
At a meeting last month of the program’s partners — NCSU Waste Reduction and Recycling, the Athletics Department, Wolfpack Sports Marketing and Waste Industries — the program’s name was changed to W.E. Recycle, with the W.E. standing for Wolfpack Excellence.
“We’d like to sort of take it in a new direction, but also kind of maintain some of that interest and excitement and the sense that recycling simply is what we do at N.C. State,” Ryan Powell, who works in the University’s Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling, said.
Powell said having former football coach Chuck Amato’s name on the program was a great boost for the program in the past.
“It was really clear just from the days after and all during the program that that connection between Chuck Amato and our recycling program was really beneficial from our standpoint and that it got a lot of people to pay attention to recycling efforts and the symbolic importance of everyone at N.C. State kind of doing their part,” Powell said.
Chris McHenry, who coordinated volunteers for the program in the fall and graduated in December, said he had been a proponent of keeping the program’s original name because of its success.
“The main reason that I wanted to keep the same name is everyone recognizes the name, and so it’ll be interesting to see how in the fall whether or not people recognize it still, even though it has a different name and maybe a different style,” McHenry said. “I hope that the name change doesn’t affect the popularity.”
Nevertheless, he said the group wanted to move in a direction that focused more on the University and less on a single person.
“We saw the move toward Wolfpack Excellence or W.E. Recycle as being an opportunity to realize symbolically that we’re moving away from this being a coach’s program or something that we have to kind of tie to a coach or a leader in order to sell to moving towards a program that we believe North Carolina State University is at this point where they do an exceptional job of recycling,” Powell said.
Powell added the partners have not yet come up with a new logo for the program to replace the one that featured a likeness of Amato. He hinted his office may seek help from College of Design students in “rebranding” the program’s logo, but that a final decision on how to come up with the logo hasn’t been made. Powell also said he is unsure of what the costs will be to outfit the current recycling bins with a new logo.
While Paul Mobley, a 2006 alumnus who came up with the program, acknowledged the new name may not give the problem as much visibility as its previous name did, he said fans will still know what the program is about.
“I guess that slogans and being kind of easily recognizable to students might not be as easy,” Mobley said. “But I’m sure everybody [will] still know what to do with it.”
And as Amato’s firing in November showed, coaches don’t have a permanent spot at the school. That’s something Mobley said makes the program’s new name a positive.
“It’s a little safer not having to change it each time there’s a change in the coach,” Mobley said.
Meanwhile, McHenry said the name isn’t catchy, but that’s partly because of how good a name the program started with.
“Honestly, I think it sounds very generic, but I can’t really complain too much because I asked a lot of people for suggestions and thought of a lot of things myself,” McHenry said. “And it’s a challenge to top the name that we already had.”