Editor,

Kendra Hartmann’s opinion column on recycling is naïve at best and downright ignorant at worst. To hold facilities staff responsible for a shortage of recycling bins due to their “lack of interest” in cooperating with students and faculty is wrong and sends a mixed-message.

It reinforces the belief that custodians are at fault for dirty bathrooms, dusty corridors, over-flowing garbage cans, and cigarette-butts strewn on the campus grounds.

Hartmann credits facilities management for having “diverted 58 percent of the school’s waste away from landfill.” Most of the diverting was done by custodians and laborers.

She then connects how the budget cuts have affected SF State’s tree-friendliness without linking the cuts to the expanding student body, faculty and square-footage increase.

This invisible entity gets a daily earful from faculty, students, administrators and fellow staff members about how they are not doing their job to keep the campus clean, beautiful, and environmentally correct.

Vicki Anderson
Creative Arts & SFSU job steward