As many students and faculty members have begun to notice, Carlmont’s campus starts the day off clean, thanks to the hardworking janitorial staff, and slowly becomes a cesspool for teenage trash as students carelessly litter the campus throughout the day.

“There is quite a bit [of trash] and I would say it’s a problem,” said sophomore Claire McKeefry.

Most of this trash is accumulated during lunch around B hall, the quad, and the upper quad area, where a majority of the students spend their lunchtime talking, eating, and of course, letting their trash fall to the ground.

One of the most disturbing features of these lunchtime activities is that many students take the unwanted portions of the food they have bought from the Pit Stop or student store and throw it around like a plaything.

B hall, for example, has been littered with trash every single day after lunch. Some of the students who sit there like to throw food at the people who pass by, as if wasting food is a game.

“I don’t think they should spend time during lunch here [in B hall], we have big campus they should go somewhere else,” said Felix Guzman, a chemistry teacher at Carlmont, who teaches in a classroom in B hall.

Guzman has noted that there has been some recent murmurs among the Carlmont staff on the controversy over whether the school should restrict students from eating in B hall.

Guzman continued to explain that the faculty has come up with the idea of closing off B hall to both find out who makes the mess, and to see how much trash on school campus is cut down due to their actions.

“Hallways are for people to walk through,” said Guzman, “trash and rough games make hallways unsafe.”

There have been studies by the California Waste Reduction Program which have noted that schools with the Offer Verse Serve lunch program, in which students are allowed to decline the food they would not eat, have cut down their waste by an average of about 1.5 tons a year.

If Carlmont were to take on that program, much of the school’s waste would be drastically reduced in a small amount of time.

The second biggest feature of this problem is that students are unaware of where to actually dispose of their trash and recycling.

“I do not think I have ever seen a recycling bin on campus other than the one behind the school,” said sophomore Cena Cook.

Due to the fact that Carlmont does not have regular recycling bins other than behind the school and inside certain classrooms, many students make a habit of throwing everything into the trash.

A majority of these trash cans tend to overflow leaving students with the choice of walking to another trash can or simply leaving their trash on the ground. Most students pick the latter.

“To be blunt, I think Carlmont needs more recycling bins; we would not have a litter problem if we just had a few of them,” said sophomore Jake Retchless.

Studies by the California Waste Recycle Program have shown that schools who adopt regular recycling cans around their campus for recyclables and food have reduced their disposal costs and increased efficiency of school operations.

Even Carlmont principal Raul Zamora has addressed the issue by making a school wide announcement saying, “You might want to pick up your trash to make the campus look like it’s supposed to be.”

[media-credit id=22 align=”alignleft” width=”150″][/media-credit] If Carlmont were to simply add in a few recycling cans on the more frequented areas of campus the amount of trash on campus would be enormously reduced.