Share
Do they walk or ride a bike to campus, or do they instead drive a gas guzzler? When they purchase foods at the local grocery store do they favor colorful packaging of instant foods, or do they choose practical, economical ways to prepare a dinner?
I'm sure each time you visit the Tech Web site, you see the wonderful examples of our experts inventing ways to limit our environmental impact, help stop eroding streams, bring clean water to African villages, and many other noteworthy efforts.
Tech even decided last year to convert 35 acres of campus from turf grasses to environmentally friendly native grass.
What I can't help but wonder, however, is that while these new stories help Tech's image, why are administrators neglecting the small, less-groundbreaking changes they can make?
For those who have ever lived in a residence hall on campus, the attempts to encourage students to recycle are almost laughable.
As a resident of East Ambler-Johnston hall last year, I can assure you that not once in my visits to friends' and neighbors' rooms did I ever see one of those big, blue recycling bins being used correctly.
For some, it was a convenient chair, for others it was a storage container and for still others it was stored in the trunk of their car until the end of the year.
In a perfect world, students would use one-tenth of their residence hall room floors to store old bottles and paper in the large recycling bin, but for those of us who want an insect-free place to live, a more suitable recycling procedure should be developed.
Perhaps those who are responsible for putting recycling bins in the hallways of academic buildings would consider placing similar bins in the hallways of the dorm buildings.
Although a measure such as this would be more time-consuming and provide less instant gratification from the media, those who truly care about the environment should consider it. As we all know, true change begins at home, with individuals deciding to alter their ways to create a better world. Encouraging thousands of on-campus residents to recycle through a reasonable system would make far more of an impact than those students sitting in class, hearing teachers preach about global warming in between taking swigs from their natural spring bottled water.
Continue Reading: « Previous12
Leave a comment 7 Comments Write a letter to the editor
All letters to the editor must include a name, e-mail, daytime phone number and affiliation to Virginia Tech. Affiliation includes: year and major for students; position and department for faculty and staff; current city for alumni and parents.
There's a can/bottle recycling dumpster outside of our dorm, but what I want to see is newspaper/cardboard bins on the residential side of campus, not just on the academic side. I don't want to walk all the way to McBryde to empty my month's worth of the Collegiate Times. I don't want to walk beyond Hillcrest just to recycle the mailed box my parents' care-package came in. There are recycling bins around campus, but it seems like I have to hold a scavenger hunt to find the right bin when I need it.
Reply to this Top
Someone told me that VT's trash is sorted to remove recyclable products. i thought this sounded a little odd. Is is true?
Reply to this Top
I get the main point of your article: proponents of conservation should practice what they preach. I agree. What I don't get is what bottled water has to do with it. Is drinking bottled spring water somehow more damaging to the environment than tap water? (If anyone can provide evidence that spring water is worse for the environment than tap water, I'll appreciate it.) Yes, it's a little pretentious---and certainly more expensive---to drink bottled spring water, but if that's your biggest piece of evidence that these faculty are hypocrites then you have a weak case. Also, have you considered the idea that maybe they bought the bottle, drank the water in it, and then re-fill it from the tap? I do that all the time because I only had to pay $1 for a bottle I can use over and over (better than a $11 Nalgene). Perhaps these faculty are doing the same.
Reply to this Top
What if the knowledge imparted to the students in the lecture leads one of your classmates to develop technology leading to more efficient, convenient recycling, thus saving large amounts of energy and reducing consumer waste? Then I'd say allowing the guy to sip his bottled water was worth it. Too often people focus on the little things while letting the big things slip by. For instance, the Union of Concerned Scientists recently published findings that predict drastically reduced pollution if people change their eating habits, drive more fuel efficient cars, and avoid living in oversized houses that are utility intensive. Things like drinking out of plastic bottles are so many orders of magnitude lower in importance that they seem almost not worth talking about.
Reply to this Top
VT is not state-of-the-art. Just look at the 4-16 massacre. VT had the time (2.5 hours) and "technology" to alert the campus of murders in the dorm & a killer-at-large, but Pres $teger chose not to notify. 4-16 was the prelude to the VT $1 Billion fund-raiser, & those pesky dorm murders might interfere w festivities. This is also about failure of leadership. Failure of leadership trumps technology & recycling. Go Hokies.
Reply to this Top
Debster, prior to 4/16, how many other schools would have been prepared to handle the situation any better than VT? I know for a fact that Florida State scurried to implement a siren system and text message/email alert system after the fact. I'm sure many other schools were in the same position. I'm not offering excuses, but please realize that state-of-the-art doesn't always equal perfect.
Reply to this Top
Speaking of the Collegiate Times, has anyone ever considered how much trash is created *daily* by the CT? Why not reduce the number of CTs printed, and push the on-line CT more?
Reply to this Top