This year, I have had the immense pleasure of sitting near the trashcan at the back of most of my classes.  I get the coveted privilege of watching my fellow classmates try to land an apple core in the trash bin from halfway across the room. Throughout the course of an hour, I also see those less-daring students come by to toss something away, without turning it into a shooting game.

What bothers me is that oftentimes I notice a spare piece of paper being thrown away in the trashcan, when a bright blue recycling bin is standing, quite noticeably, right next to it. It doesn’t make much sense to me why people don’t care to throw away their recyclables properly and make their tiny contribution to aiding the planet.

This apathy towards recycling is prevalent everywhere though, not just among indifferent teenagers in a Pre-Calculus class. You can see people throwing away their recyclable cups at Starbucks when a clearly-labeled recycling bin is right next to it. It doesn’t get much clearer than “Please throw away all cups and bottle here.” When the option to recycle is so conveniently placed in front of people, you would think that they would go ahead and do it, but it seems that they don’t care enough.

It’s unfortunate, too, that they don’t care. I’m not going to digress into a rant about the problems threatening the environment, as I’m sure everyone is already well aware that our resources are limited and we can’t afford to be wasteful. People know about the issues the environment faces. They’ve heard about them everywhere; the problem is that many don’t have the initiative to go out and do something about it.

I think many people may think that taking any steps to help the environment would turn them into a “tree-hugger”- a term that doesn’t exactly have the best connotation in society. Why is that? Why is there any problem with putting effort into something that can help the world around you? I suppose it could all be about maintaining that nonchalant, indifferent attitude where nothing, especially not anything that matters, is worth your time. Far too many people in society view that as being “cool,” but personally, I would prefer a compassionate and caring demeanor any day of the week.

Fortunately for Mother Nature, recycling doesn’t take too much effort. Even those that are diligently working to keep up their uncaring image will find that they can still look cool while throwing away a soda can in the recycling bin instead of the trash can. An effortless-looking toss towards the blue bin looks just as good as one towards the black one.