Digging in garbage for good reason

It is time to take out the trash for hall residents, but instead of taking it to the dumpsters, students brought it to Stephenson Hall’s Down Under on Saturday. The trash was then critically examined by faculty and undergraduate researchers in a premier study on university-level garbology.

“These things have been done before in cities but nobody has done it systematically at universities,” said history department faculty member and archaeologist Ken Faunce.

For the study, students collected a week’s worth of garbage and documented an anonymous individual’s trash in groups, detailing every item they found.

“There is a tremendous amount of food that’s wasted,” Faunce said.

Monnii Boatwright, a senior in anthropology, has been paying close attention to what the students’ garbage indicates about their nutrition habits. She has found that fast food from McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Jack in the Box have made frequent appearances in student trash.

“They’re eating a lot of junk,” Faunce said.

Researchers also found that food items were being tossed in tremendous quantities. In one case, a whole bag of pristine apples were disposed of. According to the companion receipt, the apples were merely three days old.

“You could just rinse them off and eat them they were that perfect,” Faunce said.

In another instance, money was discovered in an individual’s garbage.

 “Being on a limited income as a student, I find that kind of wastefulness hazardous,” she said.

Not only were these trash piles representations of poor economic sense, but poor environmental sense as well.

“About 80 percent of the material showing up, by weight, tends to be compostable, recyclable, or reusable,” said Jack McNassar, a Ph.D. candidate in the anthropology department.

Jenna Bracken, a senior Environmental Studies major, believes this occurs because of restricted knowledge of proper recycling habits.

”The resources are there,” she said, “It is just a matter of people knowing how to use them.”

In addition to food, items such as used condoms, marijuana stems, and bottles of urine were also found.

“There is a difference between what people think they do, what they say they do, and what they actually do,” McNassar said.

Faunce has practiced in garbology since the late ‘80s, and has continually observed that people simply forget what they toss out. He believes this may be a potential reason for the students’ lack of self-consciousness about their garbage.

“I really hope to see students understand where there waste is going and that there is no such thing as ‘away’,” Bracken said. “Everything goes somewhere.”

A trend that concerns Faunce is the minimal sustainability practiced by WSU students.

“The modern world, especially with our industry and mass production, we are producing more waste than we ever have before,” he said. “It’s astronomical.”

Dangers of these wasteful habits include poisoned groundwater from seeping landfills as well as heightened levels of greenhouse gas emissions from decaying garbage.

“We need to start making changes, because the longer it goes the more cumulative impact it is having,” Faunce said.

For Bracken, this project is not only a way to educate students on their own recycling habits, but also a way to determine what the university could do to improve recycling rates.

“It’s what we’re providing on campus that is creating this waste,” she said, “What kinds of products can we provide to students that have less waste?”

Plans for future studies are in the works both at WSU and other campuses throughout the nation, studies that will hopefully lead to greater sustainability.

“It is the first step in a number of steps towards a larger body of research,” McNassar said.