My Fellow Students,
I respect you all, I honestly do, but lately some of your behavior has been driving me crazy. Your recycling habits? They’re just depressing. Or perhaps I should call them your littering habits, for that matter.
It pains me to see how apathetic we’ve become about our planet. Our beautiful campus deserves more than we’re giving it. Instead of just tossing The Daily Campus on a bench, walk an extra two feet and place it in a trash can. Or even better, look about 5 inches to your right and there’s most likely a hideous big cardboard recycling bin nearby.
We all learned about recycling in the third grade, right? That coke cans and newspapers can be broken down and made into more newspapers and coke cans? It should be something we’re all aware of, but unfortunately it seems that SMU students have forgotten what we learned back in 1994. Or maybe we’ve just all decided that those crazy elementary teachers were wrong. After all, they were also preaching about this weird thing called grammar and when have I ever had the chance to use that in my everyday life?
Well I assure you the third grade had some justification for spending an entire week on recycling. Know this-every recyclable piece of garbage that isn’t recycled is carted off to a landfill where it is tossed into a giant hole in the ground, buried and left to decompose. So when something like a newspaper or a coke can is taking up unnecessary space in this landfill, it causes the landfill to fill up faster. Consequently new landfills are made and this unsustainable form of storing our garbage is perpetuated. So much too frequently, perfectly recyclable materials are taking up space at our landfills. To improve this, and to decrease the pollution that landfills cause on earth, it is each individual’s duty to make sure that he or she is recycling as much as possible.
I admit that for most waste, there isn’t a better option than a landfill. Until George Bush signs that bill allowing us to shoot our garbage into outerspace, we’re stuck with littering our own home. But even though landfills are being designed to be as safe as possible, the bottom line is that they’re not an environmentally friendly option. So let’s cut down on their growth as much as possible.
So I implore you, SMU students, show that you actually care about where you live. Think before you throw.
Christy Chermak, Civil and Environmental Engineering Major, [email protected]