A couple weeks ago, I had finished my lunch and was throwing away my empty Gatorade bottle, when suddenly, from across the quad, I heard someone scream, “Recycle that, Tyler Trussell!”

The voice was none other than that of sophomore Seth Katz, a student concerned about the environment.

It’s common knowledge that there is a trash problem at our school. At the end of last year, through the creation of the after-school trash teams by teacher Brooke Wells, we have been able to motivate students to keep our campus cleaner.

A handful of students have taken action as well. Many have made announcements at morning meeting or started shouting “recycle that!” at every student who goes near a trash-can. Some students, like Katz, will even go as far as digging out recyclables and throwing them in the trash can.

But come on, people. When it comes down to it, the real problem here is laziness. Many students say that they had, at least once, misused the trash or recycling bins, and their only motive for doing so was convenience!

More needs to be done to increase trash disposal and recycling than reminders from faculty to students at morning meeting. Three things need to change.

The first is pairing up the trash cans and recycle bins. This is an obvious fix. The primary reason students misuse the garbage containers is because one type is closer than the other. If they were in the same place, I’d wager students would recycle.

Secondly, people might be ignorant about what should go into the different bins, not careless. What if we put signs on the recycling bins that specified what can and cannot be recycled instead of having the sign say only “recycling”?

And finally, the actual location of the cans doesn’t work. From the quad, I see a trash can outside of room three and another near the school billboard. How many students walk around those areas during school hours? The trash cans need to be placed in locations with high amounts of student traffic.

There should be trash and recycle combos at least in the freshman quad, outside the library next to the planter boxes, and two in the main quad.

It’s funny. When I asked one of the men renovating the library, he said that the trash cans stay where they are; if somebody moves one, the maintenance crew will not move it back to its original position, meaning we can move them wherever we see fit and the faculty won’t be upset.

The student body needs to decide where the best place for these bins are, and then we need to put them there. The signs wouldn’t take more than five minutes to make on a computer, and then we’d have a cleaner and more recycling-friendly campus.