San Rafael High School’s outdoor Quad is a beautiful place. Blessed with sunlight, blocky steps leading to the buildings, and patches of grass scattered all over, it is ideal for students to hang out during their free periods. However, most students would disagree. “No one stays there because it is always so dirty,” says Vy Tran, a senior at SR.
The trash issue at SR is not something that goes unnoticed. Students (literally) sweep it under the rug, hoping someone else finds it for us. But the janitorial staff at our school can only do so much. Every day, only two custodians work. However, oftentimes, that number goes down to one. “It gets hard when only one of us works, but I feel like a simple solution to this problem is closing down certain areas of the school for brunch and lunch, such as the bleachers and the Quad,” said Etienne Ezeff, a custodian who has started this year.
An article called “Reducing Waste at Schools” by the United States Environmental Protection Agency states: “Schools accumulate tons of waste—from paper and computers to food and books. By learning how to properly handle this waste, schools can influence the future of their school, school district, and students, and have a significant impact on the environment.” However, most students litter because they don’t understand the ecological consequence.
Angeline Phan, another senior at SR, states that she “didn’t know how litter affects our surroundings until she took AP Environmental Science her senior year. But still, it is common knowledge that litter is bad for the environment.” Undoubtedly, people should be more mindful of how our trash is terrible for the earth, as people will likely know that. They decide not to act on it. Because, well, if we were all to clean up after ourselves, there would be no jobs for our custodians, right?
Well, no. Not everyone will look after your trash when you go out in public. “Yeah, you litter at school for us to clean, but would you do it at home?” Ezeff remarks. Phan continues to say, “Students do not have that kind of awareness of what our custodians have to do. Cleaning up after yourself respects your environment and the type of work janitors do.”
Everyone knows trash is terrible, and people likely want a clean campus. Our school should be clean, not just for the looks but because the school is where students thrive. But when you arrive at a dirty campus and area, it is hard to foster learning and growth. Phan also states that “SR is already known for being low income, so not many people expect much from us. On top of that, if we have a dirty campus, it feeds into that idea that we are not as developed as the other schools.”
Many solutions have attempted to solve the problem, from increasing the number of trashcans at our school to the principal hosting campus clean-up advisory sessions. “Why Do People Feel the Need to Litter,” an article from Discover Magazine, conducted an experiment “with evaluating [an] area’s cleanliness and the availability of garbage bins. Of the 130 sites, 91 percent had at least one trash can. Only two sites didn’t have any visible litter.” Despite the easy access to the trash cans in our Commons, people don’t utilize them. It was awful when I was walking to class late after a rainy lunch to observe the trash situation; I counted at least 10 trash cans spaced evenly next to each other with litter scattered all over the floor. Although “The more trash bins available [meant], the more likely a person would dispose of their trash properly, people were also more likely to litter if they were in an area that already had trash on the ground.” So when our Commons are already trashed, adding trash cans at lunch will not stop students from further littering. Yet, the amount of garbage left on the tables and the floor did not compare to half of the empty trash cans.
During advisory, our principal, Mr. Dominguez, holds a clean-up session where students can volunteer to clean up the trash on our campus. If students are caught littering, they must be placed in the session. Cristian Molina, an involuntarily placed freshman, says, “It takes the entire hour of Advisory not even finishing cleaning the school because there is always trash to be picked up.” When asked about the type of trash people leave out, he states, “It is mostly brunch and lunch food and leftovers, and it is placed where people sit, such as the Quad and the Commons.”
If most of our trash stems from brunch and lunch food, there should be a box that says to put leftovers in. There is a rule that we must pick all of the healthy foods, whether or not we eat them. Sure, we have something similar where there is a box to put food in at the end of the lunch line that you do not eat, but Vy Tran remarks that it is next to the lunch staff, and people are afraid to get in trouble for wasting food. Therefore, this leaves them no choice but to take it with them and dispose of it out of sight, oftentimes causing more litter. Thus, in the Commons or outside in the Quad, there should be a box where students can dispose of their waste without the fear of consequences because, in reality, if there were hypothetical consequences, it would be better than the long-term effects it leaves on our planet.
But food isn’t the sole reason we have trash on campus. Oftentimes, it is the single-use plastic bags of snacks or the plastic sporks. “Evaluating Food Packaging Waste in Schools: A Systematic Literature Review” by the National Library of Medicine, an online resource library about health and research, states that “Municipal solid waste (MSW) is the landfill, compost, and recycling waste generated after a product is produced and leaves the retailer or distributor… Nearly half (~42%) of MSW from the U.S. school setting is food packaging waste generated by school food service.” Ideally, having a sanitary, single-use option like plastic sporks should be convenient for students. However, the irony lies in the fact that their one-time use contributes to the very waste issues we’re trying to avoid. Therefore, we should replace our plastic sporks with environmentally friendly utensils that break down quickly when disposed of.
But the food and the plastic at our school are not the sole reason we have a trash problem. If it were just the amount of waste, the 12 trash cans in our Commons and the 20 more on campus would do the trick. Instead, we do not have a “forgetting issue” that Ezeff was saying, but rather a laziness issue. No matter how many AP Environmental Science classes we force students to make or force compassion for others down their throats, it will never stop our trash issue. That issue usually comes from within. Habits are the main reason why students act the way they do when it comes to cleanliness. Unfortunately, those habits can be harmful, such as laziness and carelessness.
The steps we take to a cleaner campus are practical to an extent. However, they are the most we can do as an entire school to foster good habits and cleanliness in students. When you blanket ignore that help and continue to destroy our environment and the looks of San Rafael High School, then there is nothing we can collectively do about it. Trash and littering have always been a problem in our society. So when will the day come that people wake up and decide to change?