The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

It just takes BY DENINE KONWINSKI Co-EDITOR a minute. • • Deep down inside you know it's about that time. The instructor walks in, and you wonder if you should cringe. He warns, "You'll need a number two pencil for this." And now you know it's time ... Teacher Evaluations. For some reason, other than that they're a little long, a little monotonous, and a little boring, most students seem , to despise penciling in a few little boxes. They are positive the evaluations are useless. Believe it or not, I've seen proof that they can be useful. When I attended Western Michigan University, I had a biology professor who was horrible. She was severely disor- ganized, thoroughly confused as to what was going on around her, and a little off center as a whole. She missed the first day of classes because she forgot. University grading scales are difficult, but to get an 'A' in her class, you were required to do extra credit, and then, you only got the grade if she thought you should. Getting perfect scores on exams and doing extra credit didn't guarantee an 'A' in the course. Needless to say, she no longer holds a position in the biology department at WMU, and this is in part due to those dreaded 'teacher evaluations.' It took numerous individual complaints to bring the severity of the situation to the attention of those who had the power to do something about it, but the thing that really did her in was the evaluations. The majority of all her classes had . a problem with her, and it paid off to take that time to fill in those boxes. If nothing else, at least the future students were spared a lot of frustration and wasting a few (yeah, right) dollars. I'm not saying that you should go into class and tear apart your least favorite instructor to try and get him canned. I'm simply trying to tell you people to quit complaining and make what you can of what you don't like and what you can't change. Co-Editors . . . . Denine Konwinski, Jen Goodbume Advertising Editor . . . . . . . . . Lisa Suszek C:artoonist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carol Bums News Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott King Opinions Editor . . . . . . . . .Sarah Lindsey Photographer . . . . . . . . . . . .Linda Simpson Society Editor . . . . Sandy Bedient Spof!s Editor . . . . . . . .Jim Ballmer Adviser . . . . . . . . . . ....... Sonya Titus Staff: Jay McDonald, Darin Hite, Stacey Smith, Tina Jones, Sandy Parent, Rich Spicer, Shawn Patzer, Elaine Kosloski, Kimberly Wisniewski, Kelly Counsellor, Joe Brisson, Michelle Rouleau, Kristin Pilarski, Jenny Lewandowski, Jason Santana e relic.s a~ grea.t NDITION I . ~POLEMIC Vol 2, Issue 6, Decemberll 1992 -Phoenix Mu.nicip,al L~nd.f.'ill Are landfills the culprits they're put up to be? Pampers don't plug up dumps after all BY JEN GooDBURNE Co-EDITOR Recycling: is it a marketing trend, a guilt trip, or a serious effort to care for the environ- ment? Whatever the reason, I doubt I could find anyone who would tell me it's a bad thing.· The media has painted us a bleak picture. We're told the landfills have all closed because they've been filled to the limit with baby diapers, plastics, and fast food packag- ing - none of which is biode- gradable. It won't rot away like paper and bad food. It's true that landfill space has been getting more scarce. Contamination has closed some; others have just been filled up. The obvious route is to find an alternative means of garbage disposal, but that hasn't happened yet. So until it does, we do the next best thing. We recycle. We buy prod- ucts that contain post-consumer recycled materials. We avoid restaurants that use styrofoam, and · keep our eyes glued to Dow-Corning while they try to make plastic that will decom- pose, The National Audubon So- ciety, at a meeting in 1989, asked average people what per- centage of landfills consisted of per the Graphic Arts depart- fast food packaging and baby ment has saved. diapers. The answers, which It looks like the Graphic are consistent with more recent Arts paper will end up in a studies, ranged from 45 to 70 landfill. percent. "The only thing left is to It's easy enough to believe throw it away," said Hurd. that many Americans eat at fast "That's probably what we'll food restaurants at least once a end up doing. It's regrettable." week. And it's true that there Does this sound like as big are plenty of babies throughout a crime as putting hundreds of the country. But, I just can't 'tons of styrofoam in a landfill? see how anyone woul,d guess No? that 70% of a landfill could be You may think that since filled with used Pampers and paper is biodegradable, it will Big Mac wrappers. . decompose in a landfill. The In 1973, the Garbage truth is, nothing will decom- Proj ect - a group of research- pose in a landfill - the con- ers from _the University of tents are sealed from the sun, Arizona -e found that 14 tons rain, and bacteria which allow of garbage disposed of over a for decomposition to occur. five year period contained an Remember the Garbage average of less than two per- Project from Arizona? They're cent disposable baby diapers not scientists or specialists with and fast food packaging. degrees in Trash and Litter; The group also discovered they're archaeologists. that 40 % of an average landfill The group searched consists of paper. through and documented land- Here at ACC, Greg Hurd fills in Arizona for historical of the Graphic Arts Department reasons. got involved in r~ycling last year. The department managed to save hundreds of pounds of paper. Now, Alpena's leading recycler, BPI, refuses to take . the paper. According to a source at BPI, the market has dropped out for the type of pa- · •.. Our landfills have turned out to be unintentional time capsules. So be careful what: you put in the trash -- it could end up in a grad student's the- sis somewhere down the road. (Fac;ts and figures taken· 'from.Smithsonian magazine.)