LOS ALAMITOS, CA — Looking at Los Alamitos High School’s campus, it is easy to admire the school’s cleanliness. It is apparent how much care and attention the campus is given, since the school grounds are very clean, for the most part. That being said, various factors prevent Los Al from being spotless. A major one of these problems is littering. Thanks to littering, finding a piece of trash while wandering the campus is not a difficult task. 

Throwing away trash is a simple endeavor, yet that doesn’t stop students from leaving their trash somewhere on the floor. To make the matter worse, some decide to leave their litter in harder-to-reach places on campus or in the planters around the school. Since throwing away trash is such a simple task, one must wonder why some students prefer to litter.

“Honestly, I don’t know why so many students litter on campus. [The school] makes it easy to throw away trash, but some people don’t care,” said Joseph Freyre, a sophomore at Los Al.

Laziness proves to be a strong motivator for littering; since some students don’t feel like throwing trash away themselves, they leave it on the ground for someone else to take care of for them. 

The time when littering is most apparent on campus is after lunch ends. Lunch at Los Al is 30 minutes long, which is enough time for students to eat and prepare for the rest of their school day. Students roam all around the campus during lunch, often in their own groups. After lunch ends, the remnants of the lunch break should be in the trash bins, but they usually end up strewn across the ground.

Keeping the campus trash-free should not be a difficult task. After making a mess, it’s only natural to clean up. So when students litter, they show a lack of care and accountability. If the students who litter took those few steps to a trash bin to dump their trash, not only would this lessen the workload for the custodians, but it would also result in a cleaner school environment for students and teachers to enjoy. 

“Personal responsibility would help solve this issue,” said Mr. Flores, a custodian at Los Al.

Ultimately, the solution to this littering problem lies with the students. The chances of the littering issue completely going away are slim to none since the number of students at Los Al are in the thousands, and there is no accurate way to properly count how many students litter. While littering at Los Al will likely not end anytime soon, by raising awareness about this issue, it is possible to decrease the amount of trash on our campus.