Generally, motorists don't pay much attention to those signs scattered along the highway declaring that such-and-such group is responsible for keeping a particular stretch of roadway clean of litter.
For Allan Ensor, an assistant professor of education at William Woods University, those signs were a source of inspiration in creating the campus' new Adopt-a-Spot recycling program.
"I drive back and forth to Murray every day, and I always see those signs," Ensor said. "Finally it dawned on me that we could do that here."
The program is run by the school's central recycling committee, which is made up of students and faculty.
As adapted for William Woods' purposes, Adopt-a-Spot has campus groups, clubs and individuals agree to "adopt" a particular recycling bin and take responsibility for making sure it is emptied into one of the two large recycling bins - which are maintained by Kingdom Projects - at least once a week. Student recycling coordinator Rachel Graves said there already has been an enthusiastic response to help with the new program.
"We have work study students involved, different clubs on campus, individual students who wanted to help and a couple of residence halls would like bins in their buildings as well," Graves said. "It took off a lot faster than we thought - we started promoting it at the very end of the last semester and it took off from there."