Consumerism Culture Has Plagued the UO Campus, and What Can We Do About It?

Margo Cumming

Picture this: you walk past one of the designated trash areas for the residence halls on campus. You see bins that are designed for plastic bottles, littered with paper and trash, and the cardboard dumpster bin piled high with cans and full trash bags. Most disheartening of all, the overfilled trash bags are stacked on top of each other, some simply left on the ground next to the dumpster bins. Random cans and sheets of paper line the floor.

The reality of most University of Oregon residence halls is that the trash areas are just a mess. So, what can the University and other sustainability-focused programs do to combat this worsening issue?

Donny Addison, the Zero Waste Program Operations Manager, has set out to pin down the answers to this problem. The Zero Waste Program on the UO campus works to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting waste production and implementing restoration opportunities to strengthen the UO habitat. Zero Waste services all residential and dining hall trash areas on campus.

This term, Zero Waste has coined the Kalapuya Ilihi dorm as their new experiment. According to Addison, Zero Waste has reduced the size of the openings on the bins designated to cardboard, so students are forced to flatten their cardboard before placing it in the bin. Zero Waste’s garbage truck services Kalapuya Ilihi six days a week. In the trash enclosure rooms, there are several trash dumpsters: one large one for cardboard, and multiple bins for plastics and metals. This is so packed every day that Zero Waste has to send their truck to dispose of everything.

Other buildings and areas on campus tend to be better kept than residence halls. Addison hypothesized that if Zero Waste were to take an academic office building on campus and compare it to Kalapuya, the audit’s results would show that the level of contamination in the office building’s bins would be significantly less than the residence halls. “Maybe students are more conscious when they’re in a classroom setting than they are in their halls,” explained Addison.

Addison also described the measures UO was taking prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Dining halls had been working to offer reusable options to students when they went to pick up their meals. So, instead of brown paper bags, plastic clamshell containers, and plastic utensils, students would have been able to utilize their own reusable plates and utensils when obtaining their meals. However, since the pandemic started, all dining halls except Carson Hall send their meals away in single-use packaging-- contributing to a large majority of the trash produced on campus at the UO.

Addison discussed how to make students care enough to put the right waste in the right areas. He suggested requiring freshman and transfer students to undergo a short summary upon beginning their time at the UO. The UO requires campus safety programs like “Get Explicit” for sexual safety, and the many sections within Introducktion... so why doesn’t the UO require students to learn how to take care of their campus in the environmental aspect?

This may be because once the trash we produce is disposed of, it’s simply out of our hands. “Everything we consume comes from this planet, so at some point, this planet is going to be so exhausted that we won’t be able to consume as much as we used to,” said Addison. “We don’t really realize how much we’re consuming in the long run, and the impacts that has on our society. We don’t see that bigger picture of what our world is going to look like for our great-grandkids.”

Consuming is so easy in a day like today, when we’re able to order virtually anything online, receive it within a few days, and simply dispose of the box and all the wrapping it came with. Addison said, “Previous decades have established a consumer society within the U.S. We are being told to consume at a rapid rate, and unfortunately, companies make stuff so that we want to buy more. And then they make stuff that breaks, so we get a new one instead of maybe just getting it fixed... The quality of our waste collection system allows us to quickly forget about that.” Since nearly everything we consume is produced by us, we must think about how it actually affects us, and not just about throwing it back in the trash.

Trash production and recycling is a vicious cycle. Elaborating on American consumerism, Addison said, “we consumed it, we threw it away, it’s gone within a day and out of sight, out of mind, onto the next thing.” Most Americans just assume that once the object is in their trash bin, it is no longer their issue. Applying this to the residence halls, it is so easy to take the elevator down to the first floor, walk 10 feet outside, and dump your trash into the big bins. They’re emptied every day or so, so what’s the harm?

Getting students to acknowledge that consumerism culture is extremely harmful will not be an easy feat to accomplish. Helping students change their behavior and adapt to a more sustainable lifestyle will be even harder. Since we do not see most of the current effects of trash production at this point in time, convincing people that we have to make immediate preventative change is difficult.

Change is necessary, and it starts with making sure you’re putting your plastic bottles in the plastic bins, your cardboard in the cardboard bins, and your trash in the trash bins. Trash production is inevitable, but making a conscious effort to reduce your daily output is a step in the right direction. Putting in the extra few minutes to learn and make sure the choices you’re making are the most sustainable will save us, and our planet in the long run.

Addison concluded, “my biggest concern is that we just don’t have awareness, and we’re not talking about it enough, to better understand if we keep on this path, what will our communities look like in a hundred years? And then someone would ask, ‘I won’t even be alive, what does it matter to me?’”