“During lunch, a bag of half eaten popcorn and a spicy chicken sandwich that was soaked in water in the popcorn bag [was] in the bathroom sink,” Senior Patrick Woods said.
After a long morning of classes it’s finally time to relax at lunch; when you get to your table and set your backpack down, you find your table covered in gross trash, and your backpack is already covered in soda from spilled cups just brought from the cafeteria. This is the reality of Sunnylope lunches.
Trash at lunch is no new problem at Slope; however, with new seating areas built, the trash has only amplified.
Senior Alex Bickford said, “[Students] don’t seem to understand the importance of being environmentally friendly when they’re picking up after themselves. They’re all walking wastebaskets.”
By the end of first lunch, trash cans are filled to the brim — it seems, however, some students don’t care to find other trash cans and just leave their garbage out for second lunch to deal with.
Freshman Addison Briggs said, “I think they don’t pick up their trash and garbage because they know we have janitors and custodians, and [the students] know that [the janitors] are required to pick up their mess at the end of the day. They think it’s easier to just have someone else do it, which obviously that is the case, however, that doesn’t make it right. People should throw away their own trash and if a can is overflowing, they should find another.”
Lots of students do a good job throwing their trash away– however, there are still a few who don’t care at all, causing lunch to be gross for everyone.
Admin has even started closing down certain lunch tables as warnings to the excessive trash.
“We have staff members patrolling every single lunch. We tell students to throw this stuff away. I help throw stuff away,” Dr. John Lovell said.
Beyond assisting in cleaning, the staff implements consequences often.
“If we catch students acting inappropriately with garbage or not picking up their garbage out, we put them on the bucket brigade. They go around with a bucket. Otherwise, it’s a Saturday school. And yet, people still leave their items on their tables,” Lovell said.
Slope is home to over 2,000 students, so admin can’t catch everyone.
“We allow students to eat everywhere on campus. For the most part, they have freedom to eat in a lot of places, not just in the areas where there are tables…In the end, we can’t patrol everywhere we have people,” Lovell explained.
Students feel that despite the admin’s efforts, there are always going to be students who don’t listen.
Senior Natalie Fox said, “They’re trying their best, but that just isn’t successful because people just come back [to the closed down tables] when it’s reopened and just make it worse.”
This isn’t just a problem in the quad. Once lunch starts, the whole campus gets littered.
Sophomore Paige Pinkerton said her lunch group has had to frequently move around the K-Building turf because “you couldn’t sit in certain areas because they were covered in food, wrappers and liquids.”
Though there are many of these students causing the trash problem, admin uses other methods rather than just closing down tables.
In the past when students took advantage of the individual ketchup packets and threw the sauce everywhere, the admin’s response was to take the ketchup away. This method could come back.
“If people make choices like that, we’re going to continue to act and you’re going to lose access to certain things. It’s that simple. If you act inappropriately, we’re going to take away things….It’s not hard,” Lovell said.
While students and staff can all be frustrated on the matter, the trash isn’t going to clean up itself. So if you see trash, pick it up to help make lunch a little easier for everyone.