In less than two hours Sunday morning, 10 Syracuse University students filled 30 bags with trash and recyclables collected from residential streets near the SU campus.

The Students of Sustainability at SU organization is working with the Red Cup Project to clean up trash and recyclables, especially red Solo cups, from streets surrounding the SU campus. Every Sunday in November, students from both organizations are meeting at 11 a.m. in the Climate Change Garden beside the Life Sciences Complex for Trash Pick Up Days. At every Trash Pick Up Day, students will collect and sort trash into three separate bags: one for red cups, one for recyclables and one for miscellaneous trash items.

This Sunday, Lizzy Kahn, the public relations director for SOS at SU and a senior advertising major, led the group of students around Euclid, Comstock, Ostrom and Livingston avenues to pick up trash left over from Halloween celebrations.

“We, as students, have to keep our environment clean,” said Kathy Chu, a sophomore biotechnology major and a participant in Trash Pickup Day. “No one feels responsible for all of the trash so we take it upon ourselves to clean it up.”

Kahn said the trash negatively affects someone or something, whether it’s by polluting Onondaga Lake and the environment’s soil, or the birds harming themselves by eating the trash.

In order to make the trash pickup more fun and upbeat, the students played music from their cell phones while everyone worked.

“We’re waking people up physically with our music and consciously by picking up trash,” said Miles Marcotte, one of the founding members of SOS at SU and a junior geography major.

As the students collected trash, they also spread the word about their organization to people who stopped to thank them for their volunteer service.

Kahn said recycling is one of the easiest things a person can do, but only about 35 percent of people in the United States actually recycle. In Europe, 75 percent of people recycle, so if that many people in the U.S. recycled, the environment would be much better off, she said.

The lack of recycling bins both on and off campus makes recycling harder, Kahn sad. If there were recycling bins beside every trashcan on campus, more people would recycle simply because of the accessibility, she said.

“We are actually trying to start a recycling campaign in the residence halls because if we can start recycling habits with freshmen then eventually it will continue until everyone on campus is recycling,” Kahn said.

SOS at SU is also campaigning for the university to install more water bottle refill stations on campus.

 

Currently, there are only four refill stations on campus. Ideally, there should also be one in every residence hall, academic building, dining hall and gym, Kahn said.

 

“More refill stations will make it easier and more efficient to have a reusable water bottle and students will no longer have an excuse not to have one,” Kahn said. “We want to create an environmentally friendly culture, where students don’t have to buy water and waste plastic.”

 

After all of the students were done picking up trash on Sunday, many of them expressed how the event was surprisingly fun and that it felt good to volunteer and help clean the environment.

 

“Even though there weren’t many students who volunteered today, I am hoping that everyone who saw us today will consider joining us next Sunday,” Kahn said. “Or at least I hope they are more conscious of all of the trash in their environment and their own recycling habits.”

Published on November 3, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Sara: smswann@syr.edu | @saramswann