In Evanston, every autumn brings a transformation of Sheridan Road and the Northwestern campus. Thousands of students crowd the sidewalk between classes. Many wear sunglasses and short-sleeve T-shirts, relishing the final few days of balmy sun. As the inevitably cool and windy weather catches up, leaves begin to change color and fall. But at NU, the leaves are not the first things to blanket the ground. That distinction belongs to fliers.

NU students obsess over taping fliers to the ground. Despite having bulletin boards, Facebook profiles, email lists and flat-screen TV’s dedicated to campus announcements, students at NU have their hearts set on plastering the ground with their notices. The ground outside Norris University Center annually becomes a patchwork quilt of event dates and recruiting announcements, all secured in place by rolls upon rolls of masking tape. Parts of Sheridan Road begin to look like the world’s most poorly designed game of hopscotch. Assuming that placing fliers on the ground is even an effective advertising method, the effects are still ugly and wasteful.

As I walked through campus observing the ground fliers, I thought about the total number of fliers stuck to the ground at any given moment. Last November, Associated Student Government sent out a team to count every flier taped to the ground within a University-designated flyering zone. ASG’s team counted a whopping 4,180 fliers.

To put that number into context, the entire U.S. version of the “Harry Potter” series totals 4,224 pages. If library printers were used to print every flier, the total cost would range between $293, for all black and white fliers, or $1,045, for color copies. The flier count was not, however, the most shocking fact. According to the same ASG team, nearly two-thirds of the 4,180 fliers were “weathered past the point of legibility.”

The ASG team counted nearly 2,800 pieces of useless trash taped to the ground. This is unacceptable.

The excessive use of paper for fliers is not sustainable. I’m not saying printing fliers and taping them to the ground will directly deforest the Amazon rainforest. However, this kind of excessive practice contributes to the wasteful culture that drives up the demand for natural resources, such as paper, and negatively impacts our planet. It seems hypocritical that, despite boasting a desire to positively impact the world, the NU student body condones such a massive waste of paper.

Additionally, as a flier weathers away, its paper and ink debris winds up flowing into the local watershed and finally Lake Michigan. Printer paper, especially, is exposed to toxic chemicals during the bleaching process which can leach out in water.

To improve aesthetics and sustainability on campus, the ground fliers should be banned, or at the very least more restricted and better regulated. The most obvious and glaring change needed is the addition of a clean-up clause.

Such a clause would mandate that all groups remove their fliers after a certain duration or face a significant fine. Another option could be shrinking and re-drawing the designated advertising areas on campus, thus limiting fliers to a smaller, more specific area.

Taping fliers to the ground is a highly wasteful practice that turns areas of campus into unsightly garbage dumps. Creating and strengthening policies regarding ground flyering can help create a cleaner and more sustainable NU in which we can all take pride.

Colin Wang is a Weinberg sophomore. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.