Four-thousand-eight-hundred-eleven-and-a-half pounds. This is how much trash the College makes in four days. Out of these 4811.5 pounds of trash thrown in the dumpster, 1107.5 pounds of it was potentially recyclable.

“It is a spectacle to be shown,” said Fritz Stine, Alliance for Planet Earth president and trash audit participator.

The trash audit involved students digging through trash and putting it on display at Cougar Mall Nov. 2 to show how much waste the College is making and how much they could recycle.

“We walked around all night and collected waste stream until about 3 a.m.,” Stine said.

Stine said that about 23 to 27 percent of the trash collected was potentially recyclable, and although the College has improved from the past years, there is still a lot of work to be done.

“In 2007, we found one third of the waste stream to be recyclable and now we found only
one quarter, so we're getting better but we still have an issue with waste in general,” Stine said.  “Hopefully, with this event as catalyst, we can really start working on this issue and talking about it openly.”

Two-hundred-eighty pounds of plastic bottles were picked up.

“I hope to foster a very deep-seated discussion about how much we use and throw away,” Stine said. “The majority of the trash was singular use items, like water bottles, that have no business existing.”

Stine said that much more waste could have been collected, but lack of manpower was an issue.

“Because we had such few volunteers and we were only going on about one hour of sleep per person, we sped up the process and started ignoring small things like office paper, magazines and cardboard,” Stine said in an e-mail. “And these things are potentially valuable items.”

Landfills are soon to shut down, said Stine, and no one knows what to do with waste once they do.

“We need to start a discussion about the over-abuse of the landfill and the incinerator shutting down, which currently gets rid of 75 percent [of waste],” Stine said. “Once it shuts down, where is it [the trash] going to go?”

Dumpsters filled up with waste even while students audited collected trash.

 “When we went to take back the trash, the dumpsters were full again,” Stine said. “One day, and they were already almost full.”

The ultimate goal, Stine said, is to help people realize that trash does not simply disappear.

“The idea of trash and waste is being buried, and that’s a big problem that society has,” Stine said. “We want to show the kids on campus that it [trash] doesn’t go away, its life is a long one.”

Waste is such a simple idea, and it is even easier to recycle that waste, Stine said.

“People will see the trash, the simplicity of it will slap them in the face,” Stine said. “It’s disturbing, so we should stop and talk about it.”

The trash audit earned $102.48 the recyclable material, and Stine said much more can be saved from recycling in the first place.

“We are good at being clever, but only for so long,” Stine said. “We need to give up the things we love to get rid of trash.”