If I could sic Captain Planet on this university, I would send him straight to the Footnotes Café at McKeldin Library. Here, the good Captain would be faced not with Verminous Skumm or Duke Nukem but with bookworm bums who quaff lattes and toss the cups into the recycling bin.

The sight of this recycling bin, sufficiently plastered with signs indicating “Cans and Plastic Bottles Only,” yet blatantly stuffed with Starbucks paraphernalia, would appall the Captain and he would keel over and slowly, agonizingly vaporize – toes first – into biodegradable nonexistence. For Captain Planet knows the only thing worse than grossly obese and villainous corporate scum is a whole generation of young and docile consumers shepherded into groupthink. And even an eco-hero can’t save the day in this absurd little fictional scenario I just pulled out of my butt.

The big problem behind a trashed campus is apathy. The bigger problem is people simply not paying attention. Here’s the thing, I saw three coffee cups in the recycling bin at McKeldin, one for each hole. That might have been because of a sole culprit rendered entirely dysfunctional from too much caffeine, but more likely, someone saw a cup there and crammed his in too.

Listen folks, bad things happen in the world when people follow suit without thinking first. Wars start, communism expands and Uggs safely continue their wretched existence. You, as a citizen of this university and vaguely intelligent human, must use your noggin. Not just in matters of recycling but littering too. One crushed cigarette butt on the pavement is gross, but two are worse. It adds up.

We know that at least 38.9 percent of the U.S. waste stream is paper. We also know there’s a trashcan around every turn on this campus. And as of third grade we knew, in all its alliterative brilliance, to reduce, reuse and recycle. Yet there’s a crushed beer can for every deranged squirrel on the grass.

Every once in awhile too, a gaggle of sorority girls will haul out cartons of postcard-sized fliers and twirl them around outside South Campus Dining Hall. Not only is this littering, but it also accounts for the vomit-like pulp on the pathways after a good thunderstorm. I know she did it when you were a kid, but your mom’s not going to pick up your slack anymore. There’s a trashcan on every corner of the campus; there are recycling bins on every floor of the dorms. It’s all you, baby.

Let me rehash what many of you didn’t catch the first time around in elementary school: Don’t dump anything on the ground, and when you find a bin to throw it in, make sure it’s the right one. To drive home the point, this university is participating in an inter-collegiate recycling competition until April called Recyclemania. It pits us against all the schools in the ACC (this means Duke).

If it’s a chance to beat Duke again, why not? Maryland gets some fine things done in the name of recycling: Resident Life managed to collect 11 tons of your move-in day cardboard junk in fall 2005, and 270,000 pounds of cardboard gets hauled out from the Stamp Student Union every year. Those are big numbers, and it’s an even bigger investment in a more sustainable way of life. If our college is spending its resources and energy on this great campaign, don’t be the jerk tossing your bottle in the wrong bin. Do the right thing and hold on to your trash until you find the right place to put it.

Jack Johnson came out with a nice album last year called Jack Johnson and Friends as the soundtrack for the Curious George movie, which targets 6-year-olds. The song “3 Rs, The,” which is about reducing, reusing and recycling, is snuck between tracks labeled “Jungle Gym” and “The Sharing Song.” Check it out, maybe?

Nandini Jammi is a freshman English major. She can be reached at jammin@umd.edu.