Unappetizing leftovers

After late night dining ends, the trash cans outside The Diner on North Campus overflow with food scraps and stacks of used take-out containers as bees hover above, enough to take away students’ appetites but not to change Dining Services’ trash pick-up policy.

Although Dining Services and Facilities Management officials acknowledge heaps of garbage and leftovers pile up in the area, neither organization has received any formal student complaints about the brimming trash cans in the Ellicott Hall quad. There are no plans to begin collecting trash during late night service.

“If we started hearing from our customers that this is a large concern, we will change the way we do business,” Dining Services spokesman Bart Hipple said.

Currently, the pizza crusts, chicken bones and sandwich wrappers that litter the courtyard are collected at 6 a.m. the following morning.

“It’s really gross that all that trash is just sitting around The Diner all night,” said sophomore fire engineering major Mollie Semmes. “I just feel bad for the people who have to pick it all up.”

Many students said bulky take-out containers, which stack precariously high over the brim of the receptacles, were the source of the problem.

“Throwing your trash away at The Diner is like playing Jenga with a trash can,” freshman aerospace engineering major Josh Johnson said.

Associate Vice President for Facilities Management Frank Brewer said that there have been no reports of bugs or rodents collecting around the piles of garbage.

“I’m thinking that this kind of circumstance can’t be unusual in high-traffic areas, not just on campus but in cities everywhere,” Brewer said. “It is, however, very uncommon and expensive to organize trash pickup in the middle of the night.”

Although some students attempt to perfect the art of trash-stacking when throwing their scraps into the ever-growing pile, others seek out different places to throw out their garbage to avoid the problem.

“There is an empty trash can less than 10 feet away from the one that is always overflowing,” freshman family studies major Katlin Greene said. “You can either throw your trash away there or inside.”

The problem occurs when students sit in the dining hall, eat out of take-out containers and throw them away on their way out of The Diner.

“At this point, using china at late night is not an option because of the costs involved in staffing a dish washing room late at night,” Hipple said. “Also, a lot of students carry out at night, so I don’t think the demand is there.”

Although officials currently have no plans to mitigate the situation, many said they were not aware of the problem. This could be due to the time the overflowing containers are an issue: The trash collects during the late night hours, while administrators are not on the campus, and is gone by the time they arrive in the morning.

ahemmati at umdbk dot com