UC Davis design students are trying a new approach to get people on campus to change their trashy behavior: embarrass them.

The students have created posters with bold graphics and pointed messages tailored to occupants of four UC Davis buildings that turned up among the worst trash generators in a student-led campus waste audit earlier this year. The student designers' goals are to change people's behavior, help create a greener campus and, at the same time, get real-world experience in the high-demand field of sustainable design.

For Sproul Hall, home to linguistics, the students designed a poster that features an attractive woman beckoning viewers with a double-edged invitation: "Let's talk trash." The poster, designed for posting in the nine-story building's elevator, reveals that Sproul generates enough waste in a month to fill 12 such elevators.

The posters were a class project of students in associate professor Ann Savageau's Design 127 class, with assistance from UC Davis Buildings and Grounds Division communications manager Katie Hetrick.

To prick the consciences of the entomologists and other biologists who work in Briggs Hall, the students came up with a poster that features industrious cartoon ants toting crumpled paper balls to a recycling bin. "Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight," it says. "... Why can't you lift that piece of paper?" Briggs, the poster announces, sends more trash to the campus landfill than any other building on campus -- almost 4,000 cubic yards per year, or enough to fill three transit buses every month.

Tupper Hall, home to veterinary and medical science laboratories, will get posters that feature a photo illustration of a plastic dinner tray offering a whole fish coated in industrial waste, with side dishes of packing peanuts and wadded paper. At Accounting and Financial Services, posters will read: "We've audited your waste and you're in the red."

Posters go up in mid-December and will remain in place for a year or so. The waste audit will be repeated in spring 2008 to test their effectiveness.