It goes wherever you go. It curses the halls of New Trier. You go to the scrounge and it’s there. The stairwells. The lunchrooms, especially. This monster isn’t COVID or some odor that follows you around: it’s trash.

In fact, the one place where you can’t find trash enough is the trash cans that are conveniently placed throughout the school. 

New Trier over the years has been notorious for being a “trashy” school. The trash lines the school hallways and the issue never seems to end, either. 

Although students don’t have ill intentions to litter, certain situations lead to piles of trash around the school. Oftentimes, students will be in their groups and as they start to depart for their classes, they forget about their trash. It’s understandable that we will be in a hurry, however taking trash with us to throw in a trash can along the way would only take a few seconds.

Yet, this issue seems to stem from entitlement. Students feel that the school and PPS are here to cater to their needs. 

This belief that PPS is responsible for picking up the trash because it is their job is misguided. If everyone just cleaned up their trash, the janitors wouldn’t have to do more than they should. Having trash all over the place makes it much harder for people to clean the school up, forcing them to spend time away from their other duties and subsequently being overworked.

Additionally, it only makes sense to respect people who are integral to the operation of the school. If PPS stops cleaning, the school would turn into chaos in a matter of a few days. In 2016, in fact, in an official New Trier anti-littering campaign video, it was calculated that 36.25 cubic feet of litter (not including trash in trash cans!) is collected from the floors every day, enough to fill a small bathroom stall from floor to ceiling. 

Although current students might not be familiar with past efforts to curb littering, there have been many efforts to get students to throw out their trash. In 2016, for instance, Student Alliance created an anti-littering campaign that included a video called “Throw It Out For Real” featuring health teacher and rapper Andy Horne and Principal Denise Dubravec. 

Littering articles cycle through the New Trier News every 2-4 years as the problem continues to occur regardless of the efforts.

It is incredibly easy to just do your job and throw garbage, considering cans are distributed throughout the school. We should all just do our role in taking care of our own trash.