Imagine the amount of trash every student at SJHHS creates. Now, add in the teachers and administrators. That’s a lot of junk!

Custodian Enrico Galang said, “We have five big trash bins, the trash bins right by the loading dock. Every day they’re overflowing.”

According to Galang, on campus, there are 160 trash cans that produce about 100 bags of waste per day.

Some teachers encourage students to put trash in one bin and recycling in another. However, since students outnumber teachers, the students are the ones who truly control the trash and recycling flow, and the waste doesn’t always get into the right bin.

There is a lot of confusion on whether SJHHS actually recycles.

Senior Dalton Bourne said, “The rumor going around is that the recycle cans and the non-recycle cans get thrown away in the same place.”

This is relevant because if this is true, then there would be no point to sorting the trash in the separate cans. It would also cause the amount of waste created by our school to infinitely grow in size without recycling.

However, CR&R, the company that collects garbage for San Juan Capistrano, claims to separate the recyclables from the trash at a facility in Stanton, California, 28 miles away from campus. This was discovered by Roxy Amirazizi, a senior who is passionate about recycling as an AP Environmental Science student.

She said, “Ethically, I couldn’t just stand and count on that to be true… so I called CR&R… and they separate them.”

Emily Price, Amirazizi’s AP Environmental Science teacher, is still skeptical about CR&R’s claim.

“It seems strange that they would pick up our garbage and, rather than taking it a half-mile up the hill, they would send it to Stanton,” said Price.

CR&R stands by their claim. A receptionist at CR&R named Briana (no last name was given) said, “Usually we ask people to separate it, but for the cans and plastic recyclables they don’t recycle, we have a machine that separates it.”

SJHHS recycles but not very efficiently. The marked bins on campus for recycling and trash are often ignored, and many students just use whatever is closest.

When asked if they pay attention to which bin they throw their trash into, freshman Cameron McClure said: “no, because at the middle school they just threw everything into the same bin.” His friend Brenna Lucero (9) added, “It’s a bad habit.”