Have you noticed that our community isn’t being treated with the respect it deserves? So have I.
If you have ever walked anywhere in Cortland, you know you’ll see trash on the sides of the road, in yards, and basically scattered everywhere.
It’s annoying, right? We always have to see that junk on the side of the road or, if you live off campus, it can get in your yard. In my opinion, there’s more the campus and the students can do, and it’s really not that hard. Just look at the one house on State Highway 13; They have a trash can strapped to a tree in their front yard for people to throw cups and cans away in.
Obviously, it’s not just a student issue; the locals in town seemingly don’t help. That may be speculation, but the fact is nobody wants to have the place they stay look like a trash yard. The least we can do is to keep the streets of Cortland near the campus clean. A good way to start is by doing just what the one house did, tying a trashcan to a tree.
Back in September of 2020, Governor Cuomo said that the University at Buffalo, the College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, and Stony Brook University on Long Island would focus on ways to improve recycling and waste reduction while protecting also the environment.
Their ideas were to cut down on recycling contamination, waste prevention, and to take a look at recycling programs to see which one is more affordable while also helping the environment, as well as more general education on recycling increasing.
David Tonjes, PhD., from Stony Brook University summed it up perfectly by saying, “Understanding what is in the wastes we collect is essential to determining how best to manage these materials. Describing the actual waste streams collected across New York State is an important first step to tuning our recycling programs to achieve sustainable materials management.”
We can start doing that here by following the other college’s examples and coming up with our own ways to fix the littering issue. A good way to get more students involved is by actively keeping them updated with the can deals going on at Bottle Redemption and encouraging them to start bringing cans there. Not only will it help with recycling but it will also help the students start putting some change back in their pockets.
Another way to help is to copy the one house of State Highway 13 and just have trash cans set up at corners of the major streets like Prospect and Groton. We can also put another one on State Highway 13 near the Student Life Center, among other places.
Overall, throwing away trash and keeping our streets clean will start to encourage some of the locals as well to pick up. Keeping the trash off the streets will help give us a community we can all be proud of.