Over the past several weeks there have been a lot of large events on and around campus: students moving out of res hall room and apartments downtown, two commencements, all employee meetings, and the like. Over the course of these past weeks I’ve often found myself positioned directly in front of trash, recycling, and/or compost collection bins and have also had a gloved-hand inside those bins, taking improperly discarded items from one bin to their rightful home. I’ve driven our van around campus several times, with at least two visits to each residence hall to capture items that students have left behind. Some have asked if this is the best use of my time. And quite frankly, there was even a time or two that I thought (or even said out loud) – and for this I have a PhD?
So why do I help people sort their trash, dumpster dive, and heft around bulging boxes of ramen, accounting textbooks, and last year’s sweaters?
- It keeps me personally grounded. I once had a mentor say to me that she could never tell someone who worked for/with her to do something she wouldn’t do herself. I supervise several student employees and various volunteers and ask them to help me in this effort. I can’t very well ask them to stand in front of a trash dumpster as someone is about to toss several cardboard boxes and ask them to put them in the recycling dumpster instead if I don’t do it myself.
- While recycling soda cans and composting apple cores are not momentous acts in themselves, not doing this*, for me, represents something much worse. To me, it means that people don’t care. There are, of course, a million excuses for not doing something, but why not take the few seconds to stop and consider what goes where? This act of mindfulness can transfer in so many ways. What if before doing something (anything!) each of us considered how our actions impacted other humans, our community, our planet?
- This is a social justice issue. Flagrantly or even casually discarding items in the incorrect place means that more natural resources (reminder: these are limited) are being used to create more of the stuff being tossed away. The environmental and social impacts of extraction of many natural resources directly impact people – and those that generally receive the most negative impact tend to be lower-income, non-white people. The same is generally true for items at the other end of their lifespan – impacts from landfills, incinerators, and other waste processing plants often have negative impact on human life as well, not to mention the planet’s health.
So while working with waste reduction and diversion practices and outreach is just one aspect of my job as Champlain’s Sustainability Director, for me it an topic that represents so much of why I am in this line of work – mindfulness, care of other beings and the planet, and helping others see the importance of this. And that’s why you’ll still see me in front of the compost bin, helping people properly sort out their items, at our next large event.
PS. As an academic, I know this rant should be filled with sources, etc. but this is more from-the-heart than from-the-head.
*Stipulation – there are times when people cannot do the ‘right’ thing because the infrastructure does not exist or people are unaware. This is one of the reasons I still have a job and a lot of work to do… I am talking about the times when the proper bins are right in front of them and they just do not stop for a moment to consider their actions and just blindly toss.