As you may or may not have noticed, the city of New Orleans has not been recycling since Katrina. Due to lack of staff, functional facilities and a number of other maladies of the crippled New Orleans infrastructure, the service is not available to residents.

What would normally be considered recyclable is now being tossed out with the rest of the trash, drastically multiplying the waste volume of the city. If you have any direct contact with your waste disposal by, say, taking out your own trash, then you probably know what I’m talking about.

I know that in my own apartment, two girls are frequently threatened by a festering trashcan. Throughout the city the environmentally conscious wince daily at the sound of plastic and glass bottles needlessly hitting the trash bins.

The situation is dire. It’s hard enough to get the city’s waste management to pick up the trash piled up in front of our homes and even harder to have them sort through and process recyclable materials. No wonder some people don’t even think about recycling. Most of us are under the impression that there is nothing we can do. That the city and Loyola are left with no choice under these circumstances. But as a student of Loyola’s rich tradition, I believe in community action.

I also feel that in these times of ecological ignorance, it is our duty as the intellectual community to take action and pave the pathway for a brighter future of the new millennium. (Sound familiar?)

But seriously, let’s look at the facts. There is recycling in New Orleans. The city itself doesn’t run it, and there is no big recycling firm like BFI functioning, but a few private companies have begun to recycle several types of materials and offer drop-offs are hauling off waste.

And not to mention our neighbors at Tulane have managed to process 60 tons of materials in the first six months of 2006. Tulane has recycled every day since their return from the Katrina semester. They never stopped. Oh, and they also happen to do it on campus. Perhaps they’re greener than we thought.

In light of this information, allow me to pose this question: If our “rivals” Tulane can do it, why can’t we? Why shouldn’t we lead the forefront of our Loyola community? Tulane has recycling facilities for clear and non-clear glass, office paper, newspaper, aluminum cans and drop points at almost every residence hall.

Meanwhile, at Loyola, the only effort I’ve ever seen to reduce the gargantuan amounts of paper wasted at Monroe Library is the software implemented to make students think twice about what they’re printing. It looks like in the environmental race, those industrious little green men next door have left us in the dust.

The city itself has other independent drop-off points that we can organize collections for. The Green Project in the Marigny runs such a facility. Green Project takes everything from art supplies to compost, while Legacy Project Office Recycling offers a pick-up service for white paper, mixed paper, sorted office paper, aluminum, cardboard and shredding.

I’ve inquired about this issue of on-campus recycling through Environmental Action and their umbrella organization, the Loyola University Community Action Program. Apparently, the post-Katrina recycling inadequacies at Loyola have not been the first. They have long been advocating this issue for a while now and according to them, the only reason recycling has never really taken off at Loyola has been the lack of departmental responsibility. No one really seems to know whose job it is. Maintenance? SGA? Res Life? Environmental Action? The students? A shrug and the issue is postponed until further notice.

I, for one, hope that LUCAP has not been fighting this battle only to see their efforts blown away by the winds of post-Katrina uncertainty. Hopefully with newly established work-study positions at LUCAP to handle this, we’ll see some changes around here.

Hopefully, all of this has made as much of an impact on the collective consciousness of the Loyola community as it has on the environmental community. Hopefully, we will all gather and realize the serious problem growing in our landfills. Hopefully, we’ll realize that a year is far too long a time to go without recycling. Hopefully, some day we’ll be able to stop making Katrina excuses for the lack of fundamentals in this city.

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more or get involved with this on-campus initiative email [email protected].

Chiara Marcial is a philosophy/pre-med junior from Puerto Rico.