On an average day, one can find Director of Facilities Management David Caldwell removing cigarette butts, empty Green Bean cups and scraps of plastic dotted around the Academic Quad.
According to Caldwell, the facilities team are the ones who have to deal with all of the litter on campus. As a former Marine with an eye for spotting small pieces of trash, Caldwell said that he has a personal vendetta against litter and picks up any trash he comes across on campus, encouraging his staff to do the same.
“This is such a great location,” Caldwell said. “The campus is so beautiful.”
Caldwell said that he feels that litter detracts from the natural beauty of campus.
“There’s an urban planning policy theory — the broken windows theory — where if a window is broken in a neighborhood, the signal that it sends to everybody is that it’s falling apart,” Caldwell said. “I sort of have that theory around litter… it sends a signal to people about the space that they’re in.”
Ella Sran (sophomore) said that to her, littering goes against many of the beliefs the college stands for.
“I believe the campus really promotes environmental wellness and supporting nature,” Sran said. “So I feel like [litter] kind of disrupts that, when it is easy to not litter and just dispose of things.”
Noah Aguilar (junior) said that his biggest concern about litter is that everything students don’t pick up, Facilities Management has to deal with.
“It always felt disrespectful to me to just overflow the trash cans and make a big pile on the ground without any consideration for who’s picking [it] up,” Aguilar said.
Ches Campbell (senior) said that he feels that the litter on campus is made up of a lot of small things that are left behind out of carelessness.
“It’s more like leaving stuff at the table and it ends up as littering because it blows around and nobody picks it up,” Campbell said.
According to Campbell and Aguilar, out of the things that students litter, leftover food packaging and cigarette butts stick out as the main ones. Caldwell said that he noticed an increase in cigarette butts lying around campus this year, which he is unsure what to attribute to.
“I am mystified. I thought young people today all vaped, right?” Caldwell said. “I thought we had gotten rid of the cigarette, so when I see cigarette butts, I’m kind of like, ‘Oh that’s like an 8-track tape’—it’s a throwback. It’s like retro now maybe, it’s like bell-bottoms or something; it comes back into style.”
Nevertheless, Sran, Campbell and Aguilar all said that there have been noticeable improvements since last year, especially with new trash cans. All three students said that while they feel like the eco-clamshell system has made a difference in reducing campus littering, the student body still could do a better job of cleaning up after themselves.
“I used to always be like, ‘Wow, there’s so much trash here,’ and it’s all over the ground, and these trash cans are not big enough for all of this waste,” Campbell said.
Going forward, Sran, Campbell and Aguilar have each proposed various ideas to improve campus littering.
“I wanted to say that if ashtrays are more available, then people who are smoking won’t throw their cigarette butts on the ground,” Campbell said. “But I feel like that would also encourage smoking, which is not good.”
Caldwell said that he is on board with the idea of putting ashtrays around campus.
“People are going to make their decisions and we just want to support the community,” Caldwell said. “I don’t wanna say: ‘Hey, let’s all try vaping or edibles instead of rolling paper.’ If people are going to smoke then, you know, they’re adults. We just want to make sure that we’re not dirtying up our environment.”
Aguilar said that he believes that it’s up to students to reduce littering on campus — if students just shifted their mindset a little or had a bit more awareness, that could go a long way.
“I think it’s easy for a lot of people to just be going about [their day] not really thinking about it and just accepting [that] there’s always gonna be a little trash on the ground,” Aguilar said.
Aguilar proposed the idea of a student-run campaign for picking up trash, or even a campus-wide trash clean-up day, as other actions the student body could take to reduce littering.
“If you see something just pick it up,” Sran said. “It’s maybe kind of gross but it’ll make enough of a difference.”
Contact Michelle Teh at teh@oxy.edu.
