Language Arts Persuasive Essay

Louanne Santos

Ms. Matter

Language Arts 9 (H), Per. 6

3 December 2013

What is in the Trash?

        Once you enter Norwalk High, there is a horrid stench of garbage; everywhere you look there is a pile of trash, in the restroom, in the kitchen, in the classrooms, around the quad, etc. How did this happen? There are seagulls overhead and in the trashcans, pesky bugs getting attached to you. We should really keep our school spotless, so this does not occur. If we, students and staff, keep our campus clean, it would reduce the amount of seagulls we have in school, promote reasonable hygiene and give our school more pride.

        Seagulls can be commonly seen flying over the school grounds. There are no bodies of water near our school or the Norwalk area, so why are they here? Seagulls should not be witnessed inland; they live in coastal areas (BBC News). Seagulls are mainly attracted to the trash left by the students during snack and lunch. "As traditional food sources are declining they have learned to forage in landfill sites further inland and on urban streets. They are taking advantage of our wastefulness,” Grahame Madge, a spokesman for the RSPB. Seagulls dig though and scatter trash throughout the school grounds causing a bigger mess. Geffrey Pullum, a resident of Edinburgh states that gangs of seagulls “rip open” sacks of garage and “toss it all over the place and dig around for discarded food.” It seems as though this is the same seagull behavior we see in our school. The campus already has trash around the school and the seagulls just make it worse.

        With unsanitary places around school, of course, bacteria and diseases would grow. More and more pests, generally flies would appear. Very small amounts of accumulated food debris left in the bottom of a trash container can be the food source and breeding area for literally millions of flies and other pests (seafood.oregonstate.edu). If our campus had normal sized amount of leftover food, imagine how many flies would accumulate? Flies may come off as unharmful because they are so small; however this is not the case. A single housefly is capable of carrying as many as 6.5 million bacteria (seafood.oregonstate.edu). Imagine if our school was full of flies? Not good for our students’ hygiene. Students would get sick just being in our school, what more eating lunch in the quad.

Going to a school with garbage everywhere is not a school to be proud of; as a matter of fact it is embarrassing, especially if our rival schools visit and notice all the trash throughout our campus. They would see our trash dump of a school and laugh at us. We would be mortified and alienate ourselves from other schools. We would look past our school’s accomplishments, for example varsity football’s undefeated 13 and 0 winning streak and realize our school resembles the city dump. Most students are not aware how important it is to throw away their trash. Throwing away a single gum wrapper or banana peel does not seem very important, until we see