The Cutest Little Trash Collector

That would be me, apparently. At least that’s what I was called, while collecting the recycling the other morning.

The funny thing is, I basically am a trash collector. Some people like to make a big fuss and insist that we’re collecting recycling, as if this makes the act of collecting it inherently different from collecting trash. The end use is different, certainly. The recycling gets, you know, recycled. But when it comes down to actually going through every building and pulling out bags of bottles and cans and hauling them all over campus, it feels a lot like trash collection to me, except the trash goes straight in the compacter. We have to sort the recycling. By hand.

It’s the sorting that really gets to you, after a while. It would be one thing if you grabbed a bag of recycling, and it was full of clean bottles and cans that had been rinsed and emptied. But chances are someone threw a full cup of coffee in the recycling, and neither the cup nor the coffee are recyclable. Most of our bins around campus sport prominent labels that read “BOTTLES AND CANS ONLY”, but somehow we consistently end up with objects which are neither bottles or cans. Paper coffee cups are a popular addition, as are those greenware cups from the dining hall. Hate to break it to you, campus, but just because it says “greenware,” they do not suddenly become recyclable. They are made out of corn. Technically they could be composted if we had a way to collect them and a much bigger composting system. But they can not go in with the petroleum based plastic bottles.

The thing that really gets me is how, even when we put a big giant label on something that says “NO CUPS,” you will lift the lid and, surprise, there are cups.

This has me a bit worried. Is our campus illiterate? This idea was suggested to me by another staff member who was astonished by the amount of trash I displayed in one bag of recycling I had pulled. “But why would people but trash in the recycling?” he asked, perplexed. Possibly they can’t read the signs.

But we decided to start asking students, and see if there was another answer. It seems unlikely that students were able to get accepted to the college if they were unable to read simple words like “NO” and “CUPS.” The common answer seems to be that there aren’t enough trash cans. It is far more convenient to put your trash in one of the many, many recycling bins on campus than to hunt down a trash can.

Now wait a minute- I thought we didn’t have enough bins? This is what I hear all the time, when people are trying to tell me that we don’t collect enough recycling, that recycling isn’t convenient enough, that I need to buy more bins. But, as it turns out, we have too many bins. And not enough trash cans.

Unfortunately that’s not something I’m allowed to put in my budget. Any ideas, dear readers, on how to keep the trash out of the recycling bins, in lieu of buying appropriate trash receptacles? Because the cutest little trash collector is getting a little tired of getting covered in coffee every morning.