Point yourself at downtown Durham on Main Street, take a right at the light onto Buchanan, and make your first left into the parking lot of a red brick warehouse. It's a building that might be interesting somewhere else; here it's nondescript among the other relics of the town's tobacco years.
You find yourself in a concrete yard surrounded by panel trucks and Ford F-250s converted to run off of biodiesel. In front of you is a row of rusty dumpsters filled with beer cans, Snapple bottles, the tattered remains of months of Econ homework. The ground is coated in a gritty crust of broken glass, mud, the residue of various kinds of alcohol and bleached-out hunks of cardboard boxes.
This is the Duke Recycles warehouse. This is where college goes to die.
It's also where I work this semester, something of a dream job for me. When I was a kid, being a garbage man seemed like pretty much the ideal occupation to me (I also dreamt of mowing lawns and being a janitor, so it's kind of remarkable I've made it this far), and it's a fantasy that's stuck with me through the years.
To put it simply, I've always been fascinated by trash. When I was young I marveled that I could take something in perfect working order and make it trash simply by virtue of putting it in a trash can. Objects that moments ago were useful and valued became worthless instantaneously, food that was once delicious became automatically disgusting and men in large trucks would come weekly to whisk it all away.
Where did it go? I had no idea. There were some hazy images of landfills (I did grow up in New Jersey, after all), but to my young mind these were mostly filled with seagulls and toxic waste.
That was the magic of it all: Trash existed in an alternate reality, a world that was totally separate from my own. Once I threw something away, I never had to think about it again. It became somebody else's problem.
It's an understanding of trash that never really changed from my childhood, and one that I think most people share. Here at Duke, it's an understanding that's continually reinforced by how remarkably convenient it is to throw things away. We get annoyed when we have to walk 20 feet to find a trash can. We don't even have to roll the cans down to the curb here; someone will come get them from our hallway. If we're drunk or careless, we can even throw our trash on the ground and not worry too much about it. Somebody else will clean up our mess.
Now that I work for Duke Recycles, trash is no longer somebody else's problem. It's mine, and I get a first-hand look at how wasteful this college-students, faculty, and staff-can be.
A few days ago I hauled dozens of boxes out of Pratt and the Divinity School, filled with hundreds of glossy admissions brochures, unopened and unread, to be thrown in a dumpster and reprocessed. After the Graduate Student Campout, I watched as a truly remarkable number of unopened cans of Busch Light were crushed and compacted with the rest of the empties. Every day on the job I handle huge bags of white printer paper, most filled with misprints and unwanted pages from e-Print stations all around campus.
Although it's true that all of what I mentioned is destined to be recycled, it's small comfort when you consider that none of it should have been thrown away in the first place, and that only 25 percent of the waste produced at Duke gets recycled. For every pound of white paper I recycle, there's probably several hundred more speeding to the Durham municipal waste transfer station in the back of a dump truck.
According to figures compiled by Duke Recycles, the undergraduate student body produces 3,500 tons of trash every year. With 6,534 students at this University, that's roughly 1,070 pounds per student, per year. On top of that, we're only here a little less than eight months of the year, and God only knows how much trash we produce on breaks.
Would it help if we recycled more? Probably so. Based on observation, we throw away a stunning number of plastic bottles and aluminum cans every day, even though this is technically illegal. I know it may be inconvenient to carry around an empty bottle for a couple of minutes, but with more than 2,000 receptacles all over campus, finding the proper place for it shouldn't be too hard.
At this point, though, telling people we need to recycle more is like telling them murder is wrong. This is not a revelation, nor is it a cure-all. A more complete solution involves us producing far less waste in the first place.
To do that we need to address our relationship with trash described earlier. We need to acknowledge that what we throw away is not somebody else's problem but our own, and that we have considerable control over how much garbage we create. This may include not taking a bag at the Lobby Shop or Uncle Harry's unless we really need one, or using the same plastic fork for the whole day instead of getting a new one at every meal. It may include being more careful when we use e-Print, and less careless about our recyclables.
Above all, it should include thinking about what we consume and get rid of. Some waste is unavoidable, especially on a college campus. Most is the result of thoughtlessness.
Brian Kindle is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Tuesday.
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