Hiding Under the Ivy in Peabody Park

Feature story, The Carolinian (Greensboro, North Carolina), 11 November 1999. A photo with this story, not reproduced here, showed students beside their pile of collected trash.

Hiding Under the Ivy

By Kate Peeples
Staff Writer

In the Peabody Park Rangers’ ivy pulling project last weekend, a wealth of interesting things were found. If any of them belong (or belonged) to you, tough luck.

• —a case’s worth of beer bottles (some not even empty!), most broken
• —a carton’s worth of empty cigarette packs
• —a complete set of plastic dining utensils (in addition to a few odd forks and spoons and some drinking straws)
• —a pair of women’s underwear
• —a small, pink, fully-functioning fast-food restaurant version of a Furby (sorry, we’re keepin’ that!)
• —lots of broken window glass
• —a Timex watch
• —an unbroken Nissan hubcap
• —a bent, rusted iron rod
• —a burnt fuse
• —about a 24-pack’s worth of aluminum soda cans
• —about a six-pack’s worth of plastic soda bottles

This probably isn’t even the complete list. Quite honestly, there were too many pieces of unnecessary litter out there for me to name here. Most of the stuff listed was there and, were it not for the efforts of the Rangers, would still be there today and would still be there a century from now. Why? Because most of those items—plastic, class, aluminum, etc.,—do NOT biodegrade.

You may have found this list humorous, and you may think it’s not your problem. Well, I’ve got news for you. It IS your problem. This campus is OURS. This list applies only to the small wooded area behind Reynolds Hall. I challenge you to just take a close look around you on your way to and from classes on any random day. Look, for example, at the disgusting amount of cigarette butts lying on the ground. It’s time to take matters into our own hands: be kind and pick up trash you see lying around, and, better yet, DON’T drop your trash on the ground.