Coming away from another Veishea weekend, we saw our campus transformed into a sprawling celebration grounds … and then into a big dumping grounds for refreshment containers, fliers, newspapers, candy and confetti.

There are more than 300 trash cans and about 150 cigarette receptacles on our campus. That’s nearly 500 places to dispose of trash while on campus. So why do so many choose the ground when dumping things they don’t want? The ground is a clear choice for so many due to the piles of rubbish, empty bottles and cigarette butts found by every sidewalk and building.

The laziness of litterers is, perhaps, not a battle we’ll ever win, despite the nonstop efforts of Campus Services. But there are more deliberate efforts that hurt the beauty of our campus just as much — the notoriously annoying duct-taped fliers. By a tunnel that leads to Frederiksen Court, there are the remnants of a duct-taped sign that was placed more than a year ago. And freshly taped fliers pop up each day.

This week, dozens of fliers advertising jobs at a summer camp appeared on Central Campus.

Dear Business Owners: Our campus is not your billboard.

Dear Friends of Those With an Upcoming Birthday: We appreciate your jovial attitudes, but we’re paying for a nice, clean campus, not one riddled with Xeroxes of your friends holding beer bottles.

The annoyance of these incidents aside, it’s utterly careless to plaster what should be a beautiful campus with cheap advertisements and fliers for friends. It’s OK to chalk on campus if the need to spread sidewalk messages is that overwhelming. Anything that can be easily washed away falls within campus regulations.

And if chalk isn’t the way to go, there are bulletin boards in every building on campus, most of which are only cleared on a monthly basis. Use these as your message centers if you need to spread the word to your fellow students, even if it is to announce a birthday.

Those trying to attract clients really should know better than to tape garbage to the ground. While it does prove a testimonial to the power of duct tape, it’s a huge disservice to everyone at Iowa State to have to look at the remains of the tape as it slowly erodes away. The tape generally outlasts whatever useless flier it was holding down by several weeks, and the dirty outline of the tape’s glue can last for months afterward.

We argue that we should not have to pay property taxes on our land-grant universities. But even the maintenance of our land takes time and money —ÿand adding to it by senselessly littering and duct-taping fliers only adds to what the university must invest to keep our campus clean.

Walk the extra ten feet and pitch your garbage in a trash can. And keep the announcements in the forums they were designed for, not taped around campus.

Editorial Board: Cavan Reagan, Amber Billings, Ayrel Clark, Charlie Weaver, Katie List