Despite being asked to clean up after themselves, about 3,000 students celebrating Memorial Day weekend left piles of debris
College students celebrating Memorial Day weekend by California’s Shasta Lake left behind hoard of trash, according to US Forest Service officials.
Last weekend, approximately 3,000 students from the University of California, Davis and the University of Oregon partied at Shasta Lake, a 30,000-acre reservoir in the golden state, and left piles of debris cluttered around the lake.
According to forest service officials, despite being asked to clean up after themselves, the students left behind trash including cups, cans, plastic wrappers and pool floats.
Speaking to CBS, Shasta-Trinity National Forest recreation staff officer Deborah Carlisi said that staff members handed out trash bags to students for them to pack up their items.
“Some students used them, some students didn’t,” Carlisi said. A three-person cleanup crew ultimately spent six hours picking up the trash around the lake. Nevertheless, not all the trash was removed.
It wasn’t in this article, but another article on the incident mentioned that earlier in the year, there was a large group of students from Oregon State University who had a similar party weekend. The difference was that 40 of them stayed an extra day to clean up and haul out trash.
In that situation, it took just a small minority of people to clean up the entire mess of the large group. I have no idea if this is something that had been planned from the start but I can see how just a few principaled individuals deciding to clean up could inspire folks who maybe felt bad but didn’t want to make a fuss to stay and help out.
That’s awesome!