Proposal for Change

Proposal for Change

The United States is the world’s leading waste producer and somehow manages to produce a quarter of the world’s waste, despite the fact that its population is less than 5% of the total world’s population. Paper, food scraps, and plastics dominate this waste and hindering this growth is a constant uphill battle. Research finds that around $165 billion of food is wasted each year and of the 75% of solid waste that can be recycled, only 30% is actually recycled(Huffington Post). America’s waste production is full of bad habits and a lack of education and is ultimately harming our environment with an increased amount of methane gas and destruction of habitats to create landfills to feed our trash addiction. As Humes wrote “As much as 17 percent of the garbage that they were hauling up in the late 1990s and early 2000s consisted of food waste”(Humes, 159) On a much smaller scale, the campus of DU also fails to recycle properly and continues to accumulate a large sum of food waste. If change isn’t implemented as soon as possible, DU will continue to add to America’s trash epidemic. Society as a whole should take action immediately, and whether the spark for change should begin at the DU campus, change is inevitable.

Despite efforts by the University student government to make recycling more accessible to students, our recycling efforts are failing. The university is facing high contamination rates in recycling bins, and high rates of recyclables in trash cans. With contamination, the purpose of recycling bins is pointless. When confronting many students about where they put their recyclables/ garbage many answer “I don’t know”. The University of Denver needs to educate dorm dwellers and all students about both the importance of recycling and the basics of where trash goes.

            Before freshman year begins first-years are required to take an hour long alcohol wise course mapping their drinking habits before you are able to even register for classes. During orientation week first-years are required to sit through a 2 hour lecture on drugs and alcohol. Then two weeks after that, students are required to take another online course about alcohol, which is almost identical to the first one. During the first few weeks at DU students spend a total of 5 hours “learning” about alcohol. This program is seen as a joke and waste of time to many students and therefore is not effective. As described the issue at the school is education. Students continually find themselves in situations where they must guess what bin to put their trash in which often times leads to contamination. For instance, with the paper napkins, most people just throw it into any bin they can even though they can be recycled or composted on campus. Our proposal is that the University of Denver eliminates one of the online alcohol awareness classes and cut the alcohol lecture in half to make way for an environmental program. We understand alcohol safety is important, but overloading students with alcohol course after alcohol course is not effective especially when they are not taken seriously.

            Students will be asked to complete the first online course before orientation week. We believe this will help kick start their interest in sustainability and give them an idea that DU cares about its’ trash production. We do not anticipate this online course to be tedious or difficult but strictly informative. Once students arrive here on campus for orientation week the second phase of the program will begin. Orientation groups will be taken into the dining halls and shown what type of waste goes in which bin and why. Not only will they be educated about waste in the dining halls, they will also be shown what to do with waste they create in their own dorm rooms. Every student has a recycle and normal trash bin in his or her room but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are being utilized correctly. This course will go over what type of waste goes in which of those bins and then also how to properly dispose of it out of the room when the bin is full. This class should last no more than an hour but could make a world of difference on campus.

            Unlike the Alcohol Wise, this class will be immersive and interesting. Instead of teaching in the classroom we will conduct our class in the cafeteria. As David Orr said “indoor classes create the illusion that isolates, from the students call, without apparent irony “the real world”(Orr,14). By doing the class in the cafeteria we will be creating a hands- on experience that will cause little to no confusion about the message. This way, students will see firsthand what garbage goes in what bin. Not only will students learn where to put their trash but they will also learn why. Many students simply throw away their trash in the wrong bins because they are under the impression that that it doesn’t matter. Once students start to comprehend the reason behind separating the trash and what good comes out of we will have much more compliance which will lead to less contamination thus making us greener. As of now, the majority of students do not even know what composting is. How can we expect students to participate in composting if they simply do not even know what it is or the benefits of it?

            As opposed to sending students on a guilt trip about their alcohol consumption, the class we are proposing will not make students feel bad about what they do and don’t recycle. That is not the goal. The goal should be instead to inform and help students begin to make the correct choices in the future and not worry about how they used to handle their waste. We believe this would be much more effective and informative and also give people a good overall feeling of the program. If students are convinced that we are trying to help them and steer them in the right direction as opposed to scaring them into to changing like Alcohol Wise does, we will have much more cooperation and participation. As participants ourselves of Alcohol Wise, we also noticed that there was too much reading followed by a quiz. This is not effective because no teenager wants to read pages of text especially when it is only making them feel guilty. We plan to incorporate pictures and infographics which get the point across easier, quicker, and more effectively than paragraphs of endless information that most simply do not even read. The message will be simple: where to put what trash and why it matters.

            If these courses are to be implemented it could have a huge impact not only on food waste and composting but also on our overall trash production and recycling. This could push DU in the right direction towards a much greener campus and students who are educated on the subject of sustainability. These classes could potentially set DU apart from other institutions as far as sustainability as well. After gaining the support of the entire student community DU will be on the right track to be sustainable and green.

George Apregan, Jp Bruner, Jake Rogers