When I moved back into my house in Bloomington this August, I took note of the new neighbors joining my block as they funneled into their new houses with cars packed to the brim and concerned parents in tow. Moving into a new place almost inevitably generates plenty of trash, including furniture, appliances and all the other pieces of plastic we need to buy to live comfortably.
Unfortunately, many people seem to accept this reality without concern and dump their trash outside — leaving other people to take care of the mess. Just a few days after people began moving in, one house on my street had a large, unsightly pile of cardboard boxes strewn across its front curb. Unsurprisingly, Bloomington Sanitation did not pick it up.
Bloomington Sanitation requires waste to be fully contained in trash and recycling containers, with the lid closed. And so, the pile of cardboard sat in the street for the next week, soaking up rain and dirt and continuing not to be picked up. But it did not appear to bother the people that put it there — as long as it was out of their house, and thus, out of their minds.
Many of us have always had the privilege of being able to toss out our waste without much knowledge of who picks it up or what happens to it. Whether that was through a parent doing all our dishes and laundry during childhood, or simply making regular use of public sanitation services, it is a comfortable existence not to have to participate in cleaning things up.
While throwing things away and forgetting about it is easy for many of us, someone always faces the immediate cost of our waste — whether that is the marginalized communities who disproportionately feel the impact from pollution or the sanitation workers who do the largely unappreciated, underpaid work that vastly improves our public health and quality of life.
In Japan, many grade school students are held responsible for cleaning their classrooms, as opposed to relying on janitorial services like many American students. However, some American schools have begun adopting this approach.
Requiring students to clean up after themselves teaches the consequences, or simply the natural results, of consumption and everyday activities that generate waste. It is not objectively bad to eat your lunch and produce empty wrappers, drop crumbs on the floor or spill your drink, but having to understand the time, resources and effort that go into cleaning up helps us become more mindful, considerate people as we grow up.
Students, especially those of us not from Bloomington, should feel a significant responsibility to care for the town we inhabit. The relationship between IU students and Bloomington can already be tense, especially with the backdrop of challenges in accessing affordable housing. Treating public areas like dumping grounds or otherwise being inconsiderate to the people who carry out public sanitation services is an effective way for us to make IU students seem too privileged and naive to care about the spaces we benefit from.
Whether it’s in the way we take out trash bins, break down our Amazon boxes or use the tailgate fields, we should strive to leave as little trace as possible and show consideration for the people who do the work to keep our spaces safe and enjoyable.
Leila Faraday (she/her) is a junior studying policy analysis with minors in geography and urban planning.
