The residents of four campus buildings soon will be seeing pointed suggestions to change their trashy behavior.

In Briggs Hall, home of the biological sciences, posters will feature drawings of ants toting crumpled paper balls to a recycling bin. Text alongside asks, "Ants can lift 20 times their own body weight … Why can't you lift that piece of paper?"

In Sproul Hall, which houses linguistics and foreign languages, posters will promote waste reduction in poorly written Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, French and German, concluding with an intentional typo: "Our grammaris bad but your environmental impact is even worse."

Tupper Hall, with its veterinary- and medical-science laboratories, gets a poster that unappetizingly links waste and human health, with an illustration of a cafeteria plate filled with packing peanuts, more paper balls and a diseased-looking fish entrée.

And for Accounting & Financial Services, at 1441 Research Park Drive, the message is carried by a picture of an adding machine whose paper printout reads, "We've audited your waste and you're in the red."

UC Davis Buildings and Grounds Division communications manager Katie Hetrick said the buildings were chosen based on the results of waste audits by the campus R4 Recycling Program, while the posters were created by students in associate professor Ann Savageau's Design 127 class. Design lecturer Gale Okumura consulted on the posters' content and design.

"We wanted to target those buildings with graphics and messages that were customized to the people who work in the building," said Hetrick. "To catch their attention with a poster, they have to look at it."

Savageau said the posters were great practical exercises for the students in Design 127, Critical Issues in Design and Art: Environmental Consciousness, an upper-level studio course.

"Instead of crafting some hypothetical project, I am trying to have them engage with and solve real-world problems that are here on campus," Savageau said. "It gives students a sense of ownership and empowerment. And it is excellent training for employment and their resumes — they helped identify and solve a problem."

The students embraced the assignment to customize the messages, she added. "First of all they went to visit the actual buildings. They tried to imagine what the people working there might want, which led to lines like 'What bugs us about Briggs?' since Briggs houses Entomology, and the little mistakes in the Sproul posters, because language teachers and students are real sticklers for accuracy. "

Hetrick said the posters will start appearing in the buildings in the next month, and will stay up for a year or so. In spring 2008, R4 Recycling will repeat the waste audits to test their effectiveness.

"I don't think anybody thinks that a poster is going to solve our recycling problems, but it's the beginning of a collaboration that we hope will extend to involve other academic units," Hetrick said.

"For example, I would love to involve the psychology department to design research that finds out what keeps people from turning out lights, or putting their computers to sleep when they go off to a meeting."

Savageau thinks that's a smart strategy for a university loaded with raw talent. "Students are a tremendous untapped resource," she said. "They have not only the skills and knowledge, but also the energy, enthusiasm and creativity to tackle these problems at an early age."

Let’s talk trash

The R4 Recycling Program waste audit findings included: • Briggs sends more trash to the campus landfill than any other building at UC Davis—almost 4,000 cubic yards per year, or enough to fill three Unitrans buses every month. • Most of what Briggs inhabitants throw away (81 percent) is lab waste. However, mixed into the trash is paper that could have been recycled (13 percent), and bottles and cans (6 percent). • Mixed paper accounted for 12 percent of Accounting & Financial Services’ trash, 37 percent of Tupper Hall’s and 55 percent of Sproul’s. • Bottles and cans were 2 percent at Tupper, and 4 percent at Sproul and 1441 Research Park.