Although the weather might not be an accurate indicator, the calendar says we’ve moved into the spring season.
The plants are blossoming and the birds are chirping, making the campus a beautiful place to be — except for the areas with cigarette butts littered all over the ground.
Everywhere you look, cigarette refuse is strewn about, making certain spots on campus look, well, trashy.
It’s so bad around the exterior of the University Center Satellite that students might start getting the impression that Philip Morris himself is enrolled at UH.
This isn’t to say that we at The Daily Cougar think people should be banned from smoking while on campus; a majority of our editorial board smokes, and we all believe smoking is a right that should be honored and respected.
Instead, we feel it would behoove the University to provide some sort of receptacles around the campus in which people could discard of their cigarette waste. The administration could place them in key areas — such as outside the Satellite or near the tables above the UC Underground — where students who smoke tend to congregate.
Cigarette bins would keep the campus cleaner by providing smokers with places to toss their trash, keeping them from throwing it on the ground.
The idea of banning cigarette smoking on campus altogether has been tossed around from time to time, but that isn’t an acceptable solution. People should not be prohibited from smoking for any reason.
But the reality is that the University needs to do something about this. Providing people bins for their cigarette garbage would be a relatively inexpensive solution that could help keep the campus looking beautiful without inconveniencing anyone.
The UH administration has publicly placed a high priority on being environmentally friendly. Figuring out a way to clean up some of the trash around campus would be a big first step in the right direction.
