Jooho Lee: Waste mismanagement in the Quad

My bathroom is infested with fruit flies. When I see them whizzing around, my futile attempts to terminate them with a rolled up copy of The Daily Pennsylvanian lying on our bathroom floor are for naught.

There's too many of them. And I think they're coming from the trash bin in our bathroom.

Truth be told, we are too lazy to take out the trash. But it seems like a lot of our fellow Quadrangle residents are, too.

Many of us don't feel like walking through a city block's worth of the maze that is the Quadrangle, down four flights of stairs and another 30 yards or so, around a corner, only to then fight to fit our trash bag into the little chute, while stepping over other bags full of garbage strewn about carelessly in the "recycling/trash center."

Until two years ago, many students would just walk over to a large window by the staircase leading up to their rooms and throw the bags over. We would try to aim in the general direction of the trash bins, but we weren't too disappointed when we missed.

And though mice and other vermin gave thanks to those living above for showering them with an abundance of cheesy pizza boxes and leftover food near every major staircase, this was not a good thing for the rest of us.

Thus, a new recycling and trash removal system -- part of the four-year Quad renovation project -- is now in place. The completed system consists of three trash and recycling centers located by Graduate dormitory, Morris Arch and Memorial Tower.

I guess the idea is to have students throw out their trash on their way out.

Unfortunately, many of us don't. Instead, some of us started throwing out our trash in the large trash bins placed in all of our bathrooms.

Then these posts went up on every bathroom wall: "If student room trash [anything other than normal bathroom trash] is found in the bathroom trashcans, the trashcans will be removed and not returned."

These are not empty threats, my friends. Both trashcans in the bathrooms right outside my suite have been taken away.

How does the trash disposal situation in the Quad compare to those of the other college houses on campus? I went around one afternoon to every dorm on campus one Friday afternoon to see for myself.

Kings Court/English College House has two large trash bins and two large recycling bins in the middle of every hall on every floor. Every student in the house lives less than 50 yards from a convenient place to dispose of his or her trash.

Hill College House has a large trash bin in every suite on every floor, placing a convenient trash disposal center no more than 30 feet from every student in Hill.

The three high rises have a trash chute on each floor, placing every student within 40 yards of a trash disposal center.

DuBois College House, both of Gregory College House's buildings and Mayer Hall each have at least one trash chute on every floor. Stouffer has large trash bins and recycling bins by every entrance.

Students living on the fifth floor of the Coxe dormitory in Spruce, on the other hand, would have to walk down five flights of stairs and walk for almost 100 yards before descending to the trash center in Graduate.

So why aren't we placing large trash bins in every hallway in the Quad? Perhaps they would be fire hazards. The sheer number of trash bins might be overwhelming.

If not trash bins in the hallways, then why not install larger trash bins in each of the bathrooms and allow us to put our trash there?

College students are lazy, and although I hope otherwise, I wouldn't be surprised if students continued to litter while experimenting with every possible way of getting rid of their trash without having to make the long trek to a trash center.

I naturally wanted to know what Housing Services was doing about it. After all, improving trash disposal at the Quad is a priority for it, and it is doing its best.

So I e-mailed Doug Berger, who directs Housing and Conference Services, asking, "Doug, why aren't we placing trash bins in the hallways or allowing students to discard their trash in the bathrooms in addition to making use of the trash centers at the Quad?"

It's been a month, and I have yet to receive a reply. Maybe I will now.

Jooho Lee is a junior History and Political Science major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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