Campus Corner Apartments Regulates Cigarette Litter

By: Hinata Kokobun

Staff Writer 

With the perceived lack of garbage cans around Campus Corner Apartments (CCA), Green River College reviews other efforts to clean up cigarette waste around campus.

Everyone knows that at smoking areas, trash piles up. Whether it be cigarette butts, food wrappers or any kind of miscellaneous garbage, the floors around designated smoking areas can get very messy awfully quickly. This raises the concern regarding the lack of garbage cans near the smoking sections at Campus Corner Apartments.

As it turns out, there used to be garbage cans in the smoking areas. However, they were removed several years ago. When asked why, Pete Morales, Assistant Director of Business Operations for the Campus Corner Apartments said, “The residents were using [the trash cans] for house trash, and it was piling up on the sides.”

Essentially, instead of taking the trash that students made in their houses to the dumpsters, they threw them in the garbage cans by the smoking areas. Causing large piles of garbage to accumulate, it even began to attract rats said Morales.

Currently, a maintenance worker comes to CCA every morning between 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. to pick up the trash around the smoking areas, including cigarette butts. Those cigarette butts are the result of people discarding them on the ground instead of the new outdoor ashtrays that replaced the older ashtrays last quarter.

The hardest part about cleaning the smoking areas is picking the cigarette butts out of the gravel parking lot, said Jason Wiant, Assistant Director of Facilities Operations.

Some students consistently throw their cigarette butts in those areas, and it is almost impossible to get every single one.

However, last year, the community of CCA did come together to do something about it. During one of their community day events, students and staff from CCA went around and picked up almost all the garbage around CCA, mostly cigarette butts.

The most important thing for resident smokers to know Wiant said, is to “have respect for the property, and the people who live here with you. Just be respectful, and be clean about it.”