I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the floor while walking around campus. If you ever have, you may have noticed the countless black spots embedded into the pavement. A good majority of these spots looked like chewing gum at one point, chewing gum that was carelessly tossed on the floor when it lost its flavor. We understand that it’s much easier to just spit your gum out while you walk, but there are plenty of trash cans available, most of them near buildings so it won’t be too inconvenient to go throw something away. Some of these pieces of gum were most likely chewed after a cigarette, or perhaps they had been spit out to make room for a cigarette, which leads us to another major trash problem: cigarette butts. Again, we know it’s much easier to flick your cigarette and stomp it out wherever you’re standing, but the designated smoking spots come equipped with ashtrays, mechanisms that are specifically designed for putting out your cigarettes and disposing of the butts. Unfortunately, the ratio of butts in the ashtrays to butts on the floor is still surprisingly low. Look, none of us are perfect. Sometimes we’re in a rush and we don’t want to bother finding a trash can, or sometimes we might not even notice we’re littering, because something as small as a piece of gum or a candy wrapper seems like nothing compared to leaving an entire salad on the floor (which actually happened last week). Maybe we don’t consider trash a problem on campus, so we figure one piece of trash won’t make a difference. Believe it or not, it does make a difference. The only reason you may not notice it is because we have people who are hired specifically to keep the campus clean. We can make their job just a little bit easier by putting our trash where it belongs: in the trash can. So what’s our incentive? Well, let’s be honest, we really don’t have one. But still, let’s try to do our civic duty and leave the campus as clean as we can. After all, we’re not paying to move through filth from class to class.