Walking through South Oakland every morning, I see the same couple of things. I see college students sitting and talking on their front porches, trash cans stuffed with bulging garbage bags, empty cans of alcohol from the night before and glass bottles scattered on the sidewalk. The sights and smells of garbage are everywhere, yet I never see anyone try to fix Oakland’s waste issue.
It is almost impressive to see how much trash college students make after only a couple of weeks here. When students moved in for the start of the semester, I saw more waste than ever before. There are pizza boxes, takeout containers, broken furniture and pieces of cardboard boxes disintegrating and becoming one with the sidewalk.
At some point, South Oakland stopped looking like a beautiful historic neighborhood and started looking like an actual dump. While there are many factors to blame for this ongoing problem, like South O slumlords and a lack of public trash cans and subpar trash collection, we need to be honest about the biggest contributor to it all — us.
We, as college students, are to blame for this problem.
I know that’s not a particularly popular thing to say. We already get blamed for enough, like noise, parties, parking drama, overcrowding and changing the character of neighborhoods. But if we think of ourselves as adults that can vote, sign leases, hold jobs and make decisions about our futures, we should be willing to accept responsibility for the trash we leave behind.
South Oakland is not a trash can, but you would never know it. The most frustrating part about this problem is that the garbage doesn’t pile up because students have nowhere to put it, but because students cannot be bothered to put it somewhere.
I’ve watched people walk past overflowing trash cans and put their empty cup on top of it. I’ve seen garbage bags sitting beside dumpsters despite there being room inside. I’ve seen furniture left on the sidewalk for days because someone decided that the easiest way to get rid of a couch was to simply abandon it.
Maybe your argument is “Oh, it’s just one cup, it doesn’t matter.” But when thousands of students are thinking the same way and making the same decision every week, it absolutely does matter. That’s the problem with litter. It is easy to convince ourselves that our individual contributions are insignificant. The bottle we leave behind is only one bottle. The takeout container we do not pick up is only one container. The trash bag we leave beside the dumpster is only one bag. But the condition of our neighborhood is made up of individual decisions.
South Oakland is home to thousands of Pitt students, but it is not exclusively ours. People live here year-round. Families live here. Longtime residents live here. Workers walk these streets every day.
Maybe it is the city’s job to collect the trash. Maybe it is landlords’ responsibility to provide adequate dumpsters. But neither of those things mean that we don’t have an obligation to keep our neighborhood clean.
There’s also an uncomfortable irony in the way college students talk about sustainability. We carry reusable water bottles. We buy thrifted clothes. We post infographics about climate change on Instagram. Many of us proudly call ourselves environmentally conscious. Yet, at the end of the semester, entire apartments can end up on the sidewalk.
The end-of-year move-out period is perhaps the clearest example of this contradiction. Every May, South Oakland becomes a graveyard of furniture and household items. Students abandon chairs, desks, mattresses, shelving units and perfectly usable belongings because they don’t want to figure out what to do with them. It is wasteful. Much of what gets thrown away could have been donated, sold, recycled or the next tenant could have simply kept it until they needed it.
Of course, this isn’t entirely a student problem. The university and city do have a responsibility to make ethical disposal of trash convenient. Landlords should provide adequate waste infrastructure. Trash collection should be frequent enough to prevent dumpsters from becoming mountains.
Convenience cannot become an excuse for irresponsibility. If there’s no room in the dumpster, find another dumpster. If you have furniture you no longer want, find someone who does want it. If you spill your drink on the sidewalk, clean it up. If you see a piece of trash fall out of your bag, pick it up. These aren’t revolutionary solutions. They’re basic ones that we should all be conscious of.
That’s what makes this issue so infuriating. We don’t need groundbreaking solutions to make South Oakland cleaner. We need thousands of people to make slightly better decisions. College students often talk about wanting to leave their mark on Pitt. We talk about traditions, organizations, research, athletics and the friendships we make here. We take pictures in front of landmarks and tell people that Pitt is our home.
South Oakland belongs to more people than the students who happen to rent apartments here for four years. And if we are going to call it home, the least we can do is treat it like one and perhaps leave it better than we found it.
Danae Poteat writes primarily about pop culture and current events. Write to her at [email protected]