Cleaning Up College Hill

PULLMAN, WASH –

The College Hill neighborhood is unique in the city of Pullman. Most mornings it’s quiet, this is a stark contrast to nights and weekdays when students who live in the area are rushing to classes or going out with friends.

“You’re talking about a neighborhood that has an extremely high population density, especially the greek row area, that population density will rival a major city, there are blocks that have hundreds and hundreds of people living on them,” Allison Munch-Rotolo, College Hill Association Chair said.

With this high population density comes a number of of challenges including the amount of trash littered on the streets and sidewalks

“Compared to like a suburban neighborhood we have a more active population, and a lot more ways to make trash. We have a population that is doing a lot of drinking, which no judgement, but people who drink don’t always make the best choices with their empties,”  Munch-Rotolo said.

To solve this problem the College Hill Association, ASWSU and student organizations  created a program called Adopt-A-Block.

“College Hill is divided into 14, now 15 blocks and each week each block is assigned to a particular sorority and fraternity and each week on Sundays at noon we go out and we clean up the streets of Pullman just to make sure we are respecting the environment and the incredible neighborhood we live in,” Belle Miller, Panhellenic Vice President of Scholarship and Service said. 

Around 10 people from each fraternity and sorority chapter go out and clean up all the trash on their assigned block.

“It’s really, really thorough. As we know things can sometimes get a little wild on weekends and so by the end of the hour, it only takes about an hour, pretty much everything is cleaned up, its pretty impressive,” Miller said.