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Due to the number of students at WHHS, litter can be a problem. It’s not just garbage, as the majority of classrooms around the school will have graffiti in the corners of the classrooms or on the windowsills. 

Certain areas around the school in particular are very prone to littering, such as the bathrooms. Some students eat their lunch or breakfast in the bathrooms, even though the thought of it is gut wrenching. Then, when they are finished, instead of throwing their trash away in the trash can 10 feet away from them, they will just leave it in a stall. 

Frequently, students eat in the cafeteria and leave their trash on the tables. The cafeteria can get especially dirty after three lunch periods. Often, if a security guard witnesses someone leaving garbage at the tables, they will have you go around the cafeteria collecting trash. 

Graffiti is also a big problem, for example, when students draw on the walls. Most recently, you can find a political debate over the Israeli dilemma in the 3300s restroom. 

These issues degrade the quality of our campus and can interfere with student life. The ‘devious lick’ challenge was a fad in 2021 that wreaked havoc on our school bathrooms. It involved students taking all of the soap and toilet paper from the bathrooms and disrupted previously painless parts of the school day. While this example of vandalism is slightly outdated, the inspiration for chaos still lingers in our students. 

For the most part, people litter because they are lazy. A good, but not perfect, way to combat this laziness is to put trash cans everywhere that people are likely to leave garbage. However, with the large amount of trash cans around the campus, it seems that a lack of trash cans isn’t the issue for WHHS. 

As litter breaks up, chemicals are released. These chemicals aren’t natural to the environment and cause several problems. Up to 60% of water pollution can be attributed to litter. Places like the forest on the corner of Martin Luther King St. and Gilbert are even more prone to littering. This is because they already have a lot of litter. Even though it doesn’t seem like a big impact to throw litter in places like this, it only negatively affects the environment. 

Every Monday and Wednesday after school, the Sustainability Club upcycles the reusable materials they find in the garbage; either completing their own projects or sending the materials to a recycling facility. One student made a water bottle last year completely out of used bottle caps. 

The Bio-Eco Club has done a lot of work in the Walnut Woods. Earlier this year, they had a volunteering event to collect litter from the woods. At the moment, they are planting trees in the playground outside of the music Lyceum. 

It is important to remember to put your garbage in trash cans, so that we can keep our campus pristine and our productivity maximized.