Volunteer club pitching in to cleaning parking lot trash

Garbage has been a problem for years at the high school, and this year is no exception. 

“It’s very severe. There’s garbage everywhere,”  sophomore Suzane Thapaliya said. 

Thapaliya is also a volunteer club member, and the volunteer club has picked up trash around the school for the past two weeks and found plenty of trash lying around the school.  “We found menthol pods for vaping, beer cans and bottles, plenty of fast-food wrappers and a couple of pounds of metal wires,” Thapaliya said.  

The volunteer club members all looked around the school picking up trash.  “I didn’t think we would need to pick up trash last weekend because we picked up trash the week before, but one look at the parking lot, and I knew we needed to pick up trash again,” said junior Akshat Mehta, vice president of the volunteer club.  

Even though the trash isn’t theirs, the volunteer club members “want to make school a better environment. Everyone should pick up trash when they see it,” Thapaliya said.  

Regarding why there’s always trash to collect, Lang said, “It’s hard to say why. Maybe convenience, but I wish there was more of an ethic where dumping your trash was just not acceptable.” 

Thapaliya said, “Many students just throw the garbage everywhere, some don’t care about the problems they cause and others are too lazy to put it in the trash can.”

Problems arise when students litter around the school.  “Littering is polluting the environment, and it doesn’t look good. It affects the houses around the school, and it is technically illegal to litter,” Environmental Awareness Team adviser Jason Lang said. “Last week some people living around the school had picked up two massive trash bags worth of garbage from around the school and their yards.”  

He said, “It has to be a community effort to keep clean. The janitors can only do so much, so students and teachers have to help pick up trash.” 

“I think students should use the trash cans, and the school should put more trash cans around the school,” Thapaliya said.      

“If students need more garbage cans in a more convenient place, they need to go to the office and let someone know,” Lang said.

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