I recently had an ecological revelation after learning about a project in Southampton. At the end of every summer term a team, focusing upon notoriously student areas of the city, ensure that the rubbish left behind by students, which otherwise would be heading to the land fill, is correctly sorted and recycled. It is one thing to be considered indifferent to environmentally-friendly living, but evidently we students are gaining a reputation for being mass-refuse producers; enemies of ethical living; a threat to the eco-system that must be tackled! Are we ‘anti-eco’?
Terms such as ‘eco’ and ‘ethical’ have a bad reputation and conjure up ideas of great expense and great effort, both of which contradict the two key characteristics of the ever-so typecast student: lazy and cheap. However, these ideas and these connotations are wrong, you hear me? Wrong! ‘Eco’ simply means to get along well with Mother Nature, and an environmentally-conscientious lifestyle is perfectly suited to studentdom – even the most typecast of us.
Lucky for us one of the most significantly ‘pro-eco’ actions that can be taken is also the most basic: recycling. And even luckier for us – what a lucky lot we are! – Royal Holloway campus and the surrounding Egham and Englefield Green area offer a mightily impressive recycling system, which permits the vast majority of our rubbish be put to good use after we’re done with it; all with minimal effort and zero cost (well, for us anyway).
Off campus, the local council will actually come to your doorstep, collect your waste, cart it away and ensure it is correctly recycled; all we have to do is make sure the tins are properly separated from the egg cartons. It’s a small sacrifice to make to keep those land-fills that little bit emptier, don’t you think?
Back on campus, the plethora of recycling facilities dotted all around mean that there is almost no excuse for any of our rubbish to be simply thrown away. And for those who have not quite got the hang of the whole aforementioned separating-process, keep an eye out for the newly established bins for “general recycling”.
So what do you say? Let’s raise those karmas, throw those takeout coffee cups in the recycling, march around looking smug, and change the opinion of the nation – or at least just Southampton.
I recently had an ecological revelation after learning about a project in Southampton. At the end of every summer term a team, focusing upon notoriously student areas of the city, ensure that the rubbish left behind by students, which otherwise would be heading to the land fill, is correctly sorted and recycled. It is one thing to be considered indifferent to environmentally-friendly living, but evidently we students are gaining a reputation for being mass-refuse producers; enemies of ethical living; a threat to the eco-system that must be tackled! Are we ‘anti-eco’?
Terms such as ‘eco’ and ‘ethical’ have a bad reputation and conjure up ideas of great expense and great effort, both of which contradict the two key characteristics of the ever-so typecast student: lazy and cheap. However, these ideas and these connotations are wrong, you hear me? Wrong! ‘Eco’ simply means to get along well with Mother Nature, and an environmentally-conscientious lifestyle is perfectly suited to studentdom – even the most typecast of us.
Lucky for us one of the most significantly ‘pro-eco’ actions that can be taken is also the most basic: recycling. And even luckier for us – what a lucky lot we are! – Royal Holloway campus and the surrounding Egham and Englefield Green area offer a mightily impressive recycling system, which permits the vast majority of our rubbish be put to good use after we’re done with it; all with minimal effort and zero cost (well, for us anyway).
Off campus, the local council will actually come to your doorstep, collect your waste, cart it away and ensure it is correctly recycled; all we have to do is make sure the tins are properly separated from the egg cartons. It’s a small sacrifice to make to keep those land-fills that little bit emptier, don’t you think?
Back on campus, the plethora of recycling facilities dotted all around mean that there is almost no excuse for any of our rubbish to be simply thrown away. And for those who have not quite got the hang of the whole aforementioned separating-process, keep an eye out for the newly established bins for “general recycling”.
So what do you say? Let’s raise those karmas, throw those takeout coffee cups in the recycling, march around looking smug, and change the opinion of the nation – or at least just Southampton.