2/18/2004

University should have more recycling bins

Erin Roof
Daily Kent Stater

I woke up one morning, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, collected yesterday’s bottles and cans and old newspapers, slipped into my handcrafted steel suit of armor and took off down the hallway.

I opened my door, jumped over the flaming lava pit, fought my way through the kimono dragons with ankle spurs (got pretty nicked up in that one), slammed up against the wall, so as to avoid the eight-foot-tall boulder careening toward me, fended off the giant, sworded rats with my bare hands and swung on the grape vine through the forest, barely escaping the monkeys spitting poison shrinking juice at me.

Beaten up, exhausted and sweating bullets, at last I crawled on my hands and knees to the sapphire blue recycling boxes, deposited my garbage, won the princess and lumbered back to my room to pick up my schoolbooks and get ready for class. Oh, to be an environmentally conscious student!

Thank goodness recycling isn’t that difficult. All it requires is tossing garbage in a recycling bin instead of a trash can, I swear. Just a flick of the wrist. No angry monkeys, no giant rats, no need for body armor.

Look around, our disposable society is killing our planet! Every day, Americans ground more than one million tons of used baby diapers, broken wheelchairs, hospital needles and other trash into her face. And many do not do their part to reduce, reuse, recycle and save her.

Now, I fully believe in the probability that someone is going to blow up the world, or destroy it in some other way, and we won’t have to worry about preserving it for future generations. But, we should at least be concerned with how it looks today. So let’s make a conscious effort to throw our empty Diet Rite cans in the recycling bins instead of letting them pile up in landfills.

Kent State should do its part to encourage recycling, too. Students Eliminating Environmental Destruction (SEED) is petitioning the university to provide more recycling bins, and I encourage Kent State to comply. There needs to be a recycling bin next to every trash can, so the maximum amount of trash can be recycled.

The university needs to be less concerned with the cost of recycling and more concerned with improving the environment. Yes, resorting to landfills is more cost efficient than recycling, but this is a service Kent State needs to regard as important. Evening out the number of recycling bins and trash cans would prove to the students that they care about the environment (even if for public relations purposes only), and it would really impact the amount of trash we create.

With very little effort, Kent State can do its part to help the environment. It just takes a few extra steps down the dorm hallways to the recycling bins, or holding on to bottles while walking to class until you find a place to recycle them. Go ahead, try it. But it would be a little more adventurous with poison-spitting moneys, wouldn’t it?

Erin Roof is a sophomore magazine journalism major and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater.

E-mail: eroof@kent.edu