“Sustainability” is one of Grand Valley State University’s buzzwords, and though not everyone is on board with “green-ing up” every aspect of their lives, there’s no excuse to not get on board with the small stuff.

Now, nobody is asking you to scrap your beloved 1993 Dodge Dakota, in all of its gas-guzzling glory, and trade in for a Prius or Volt, but when it comes to recycling or composting things instead of throwing them in the garbage, that’s a change we can all make.

When the Student Environmental Coalition hosted their dumpster dive this week, Bart Bartels, GVSU’s campus sustainability manager, told the Lanthorn an estimated 80 percent of the trash they found was either compostable or recyclable. That translates to a lot of wasted landfill space.

It’s unrealistic to ask you to LEED-certify your dorm room or try to live a “no-impact” lifestyle, but with all of the steps being taken to encourage students to live greener lifestyles, it’s hard to justify not recycling. Recycling bins exist in GVSU living centers and off-campus apartments, compost and recycle bins sit beside the trash bins in on-campus dining centers and students in the Honors College have even set up a program to compost pizza boxes, which are excluded from recyclables because of the grease that seeps into the cardboard.

Granted, sometimes knowing where to pitch your trash can get a little bit confusing, but if you don’t know, it’s worth asking somebody who does. And though at first remembering to recycle and compost your trash might feel tedious, it been proven that it only takes three to four weeks for a person to turn their actions into habits — and having a good habit never hurts, especially when the bad habits are the ones we typically hold on to.

None of this is to say that students aren’t contributing to the effort at all, and it’s not to say the typical GVSU student delights in acts of wastefulness. However, it is to say that events like the SEC’s dumpster dive are proof that there is still a lot of room for improvement at GVSU, and improvement has to start at the heart of any institution; in this case, with the students. In the article, on A2 of this edition of the Lanthorn, SEC member Josh Lycka said it best: “I think people in general have good intentions about what they do, but completely ignore choices.”