Off-campus students react to 18-day delay with no garbage pickup
(-- The Beacon)
By PJ Marcello Staff Writer marcello13@up.edu
Torn trash bags, filled garbage cans and foul smells are just a few casualties of the 18-day delay of garbage pickup for students living near the University of Portland campus.
The City of Portland's new composting program, which began on Oct. 31, has weekly recycling and compost pick up but garbage pickup has been reduced to every other week.
The timing of the new program added on nearly a full extra week before garbage was picked up in some areas surrounding UP.
Many students were concerned about garbage piling up outside their houses and the effectiveness of the program.
"Being in a house of five people, we go through a lot of food and take out the garbage a lot but we already compost so I don't know how much it will affect us," junior Brett Cates said.
With the new program, the City of Portland hopes to drop the percentage of food waste in garbage.
"We were notified a month before with a letter telling us we would get a compost bin and the new recycling and garbage schedule," junior Lisa Creatura said. "We wanted to reduce our garbage anyway and we don't need it to come every other week because we already compost so it wasn't a big change."
The transition has not been so easy for other students, however. Some have found the change to be inconvenient and cause more problems than benefits.
"The biggest problem we had with the gap between pickups was the overflow," junior Logan Mathews said. "It meant that we had to leave bags out in the yard, and those got ripped open by the homeless guys who usually come around and collect our cans and bottles. We have no problem with them doing that. It actually helps us out, but it made an absolute mess of our yard, and got us in trouble with Physical Plant."
The next few weeks will be an adjustment period for many homes in the UP area, as students look for ways to alter their waste production.
"I know they are going for a good cause, and I am all for composting, but until we get bigger trash cans, this will be a tough system for a lot of households to maintain," Mathews said. "We can only compost so much, and the rest has to fit in recycling and garbage which isn't always possible in a two-week period."
