Residents living at The Blake expressed their concerns earlier this month about the growing amount of scattered trash and the late efforts of housing management to act upon it.
Several residents, who wished to remain anonymous, said that people have been throwing trash off of their apartment balconies instead of taking it to the dumpsters, leaving trash strewn across the area behind the complex.
“It’s careless and distasteful,” one resident said. “Not to mention that it attracts more bugs to the complex than there already are.”
Students living in the complex said that the woods behind the buildings are littered with full garbage bags, pizza boxes, beer bottles and cans.
“We have seen birds and squirrels outside eating plastic,” the resident said.
A few residents said several calls and complaints have been filed to The Blake management since January.
“They have repeatedly told us it would be taken care of by certain deadlines, but those deadlines have since passed,” the resident said.
The Sentinel contacted management at The Blake, but they declined to comment on the issue.
A group of maintenance workers was spotted last week cleaning up the discarded trash around the complex, another resident said.
“They told us that the people with bags of trash under their balcony were going to be fined,” the resident said. “There is no way of knowing for sure who was throwing the trash into the woods, though, so I would not be surprised if the problem continues.”
The residents are largely concerned about the environmental impact the trash will have on the area. Animals cannot break down plastic in their digestive system, and pieces of plastic can get tangled around animals’ bodies or heads and cause injury or death, according to Sciencing.
According to a National Geographic article, mass production of plastics has created around 8.3 billion metric tons of material since it began sixty years ago, and 91 percent of plastic is not recycled.
“I wish more measures were taken to prevent environmental carelessness,” the resident said.
