It doesn’t take much time on campus to spot litter. It’s in bushes, on sidewalks and even sometimes in Mike the Tiger’s habitat.
“It’s graduation season, and while I’m happy and proud of you, please do not use confetti when you take photos around the habitat,” read a post from Mike the Tiger’s Twitter.
The litter near Mike’s habitat poses immediate harm to the university’s beloved mascot, but it’s far from being the only place plagued with trash. Litter remains a problem seen all around campus and in much of Baton Rouge.
Mark Benfield, an LSU coastal environmental science professor, said that a big contributor to the litter problem is the insufficient number of trashcans around campus. Over 30,000 students at the university generate a large amount of trash, so adding more trashcans would give students more opportunities to throw garbage away.
“If we don’t have enough of [the trashcans] or they aren’t cleaned often enough, litter becomes more of a problem,” Benfield said.
Another contributor to the litter issue on campus is the student laziness. When students see there is already litter on the ground, they feel less guilty about adding to it.
“People think, ‘The city will pick it up at some point,’” Benfield said.
This type of thinking can be compared to saying, “I don’t need to clean the table, that is someone else’s job” when eating at a friend’s house. These statements come off as lazy and selfish. If you make a mess, you can try your best to clean it up, rather than making others’ jobs unnecessarily harder.
Benfield also believed that the university would benefit from an educational program for students. This program could teach students about the amount of litter on campus, how they can help change this and the accountability they should have with their trash.
Tammy Millican, executive director of facility and property oversight, agreed that an educational program would be beneficial.
“Campus sustainability would be more than happy to participate in that,” Millican said.
Millican said the university is involved with Keep Louisiana Beautiful, a program made to “promote personal, corporate and community responsibility for a clean and beautiful Louisiana.”
The university is one of seven affiliates of Keep Louisiana Beautiful. The university has landscape service workers who check campus multiple times a day and pick up trash. One main area of concern is near the lakes, where more litter is usually found.
“It’s something that we work to combat all year long,” Millican said of the litter issue.
While the university has programs and solutions to help eliminate litter on campus, it ultimately comes down to personal accountability. Without that, the litter issue on campus will never improve.
Kate Beske is a 19-year-old journalism freshman from Destrehan.
