IU Students Turn Downtown into Dumpster
The students are back in town, and while they do keep Bloomington from becoming, er, Pawnee (the fictional town from NBC’s Parks and Recreation), there’s one thing about the students that all but few of Bloomington’s citizens missed – the huge heaps of trash that they leave in bins in front of their houses (and everywhere else too.) Don’t get me wrong – a lot of the stuff they leave is gently used and fairly expensive! I myself once found several decent quality Ralph Lauren Polo shirts laying on the sidewalk in front of the rental houses. The thing is that some of it’s expensive clothing and technology, but quite a bit of it is rotting food, cigarette butts, empty alcohol bottles, and various bodily secretions. That stuff smells!
A parking lot on 7th St., several feet away from an overflowing dumpster. Welcome Week, the week before classes start, is traditionally a haven for student-hosted parties and IU-hosted freshman events. The circulating urban legend about Welcome Week is that, if you manage to jam-pack your days, you can eat for the entire week without spending a cent.
The average American throws out about 4.40 lbs. of trash per day, which leads to a whopping 250 million tons of trash produced each year. This is no small feat and is indicative of the fact that the large amounts of trash students leave is not only inconvenient, but an environmental concern. In addition to this, they don’t clean up their trash themselves. They leave that to landlords and maintenance workers, leaving an air of entitlement.
North student Sophia Waxler is a self-proclaimed “dumpster diver.” Her greatest find was a pair of mint-condition Dr. Martens boots, which she later gave away because they were a size too small. To put the students’ waste into perspective, a pair of women’s 1460 style Dr. Martens leather boots has a retail price of $135. That is $135 thrown carelessly into a hefty bag, and left out on the street to be disposed of.
“[The students] come, they go to school, they party, they leave, they go onto better things,” Waxler said. “In addition to just trash and recycling that they just throw into the trash, they also just put all their [stuff] before they leave for summer, anything they don’t need. They throw it in the garbage, to all just be disposed of instead of recycling things or giving things to Goodwill.”
As Waxler observed quite accurately, the students are leaving behind large amounts of trash year after year, without concern. This poses the question: When will we, as a community, hit the tipping point?
On a different note: While taking photos for this article, I spotted someone (presumably a new student or their parents) driving the wrong way down 7th street.
