Waste baskets used to just hang out by themselves. Now they have big blue friends next to them, stealing all the recyclable material. Most of us have learned to differentiate between trash and recyclables, but who really cares enough to put each in the appropriate container? Well, apparently we Skyline students care.

The State’s California Integrated Waste Management Board requires Skyline to submit an annual report that documents our recycling efforts. The State mandates that Skyline recycle only half of its trash and debris. Shockingly, the reports for 2007 show that we recycled a remarkable 81% of our trash. Talk about overachieving!

While this news isn’t exactly exciting to us – and we’re pretty sure it doesn’t excite you either – it is a fairly outstanding achievement for our campus, seeing as how we’ve been addressing Skyline’s trash issues quite frequently in the previous issues of The View for this semester. If these weren’t last year’s numbers, we might just try to take credit for affecting change on campus. Instead, we’ll try to affect change for this semester, or rather, affect maintenance of a job which is apparently already being done well.

Let’s shoot for a higher percentage of recycled material by the end of this year and prove that we top our already outstanding environmental achievement. All we can really give you is a hypothetical high-5 or a pat on the back, depending on your preference, in hopes that you will be encouraged to keep up the good work and keep recycling those cans and bottles. We’ll try our best too. We have two recycling bins in our newsroom reminding us (or guilt-tripping us) to do our civic duty. As long as you keep filling up those blue baskets, you’ll be helping out the environment, minimizing the amount of litter lying around campus, and hey, Captain Planet would be proud.