When students start to leave the dormitory, the garbage that is hard to cope with fills the hallway everywhere. Students throw away various household items, such as boxes and plastic bottles, and delivery food containers. Even after filling the recycling bin in front of the elevator, the garbage bags overflow. The rest of the bags cover the whole floor and pile up like a mountain.

Eventually, the students rapped out a complaint. Critics pointed out the situation as terrible and reported that it needed urgent action.

On March 15th, an anonymous student posted a photo of a recycling center on the fourth to seventh floors of a dormitory of Pusan National University (PNU), while leaving the place on "Everytime.”

It clearly showed the seriousness of the garbage disposal problem. On March 16th and 17th, Internet articles reported garbage bags are also dumped whenever leaving the dormitory.

According to the PNU dormitory, students emit 2,000 liters of garbage on weekdays with 20 bags per 100 liters. It takes an average of one day to process all of this. But bags piled up over the weekend take two days to handle because the amount of bags is three times more than on weekdays.

While leaving the dormitory, students throw away 30,000 liters of garbage, and they need 300 garbage bags of 100 liters. The amount is 15 times higher than the weekdays and five times higher than weekends. The average processing time is about five days. The dormitory based date management director said, "The trickiest and most common matters in this situation are used carriers, electronic devices, and furniture."

Some students throw away stuff even though they can handle it. Jeong Kyung-Min (Dept. of Design, 21) said, "It seems like the students throw away unused tissues, slippers, clothes, mirrors, cleaning equipment, and books. I think throwing them away to reduce my luggage weight is a waste of resources and an act that causes harm to the workers."

The biggest problem is the shortage of workers to clean the dormitory. According to the dormitory Center, workers leave the dormitory when the students leave. The existing workers are responsible for 15 times more than the average garbage amount.

An anonymous dormitory cleaning worker revealed that only two workers take turns cleaning in Building A and Building B. She said, "At the time of students leaving, there is too much work to be done. I can't touch other tasks at all. I heard that increasing the staff is surely needed, but there is no change, and the numbers are the same for years."

There is no choice but to make more trash when leaving the dormitory. But disregarding the hardship of the workers for the student's comfort is not desirable. Such voices are getting power continuously. However, the dormitory's self-governing committee has been vacant since 2020. There is no central authority to carry out a campaign to comply with recycling etiquette or seek proper solutions. The staff of the dormitory operation said, "We are discussing with the department in charge of PNU to increase the number of cleaning workers at a certain time."

Reporter Shin Yoo-Jun

Translated by Shin Ji-Won