That's 2,400 cubic yards for the season - or enough trash to send the average homeowner to the curb more than 16,000 times.

The trash - left in 50-odd campus parking areas frequented by tailgaters and in the stadium itself - varies as widely as the fans. Paper. Plastic. Water bottles. Liquor bottles. Foam fingers. Furniture. If you can imagine it, someone has brought it to campus on a football Saturday - and then left it there for someone else to take care of.

"We've had whole living-room set-ups left," said Bill Ratliff, athletic grounds supervisor for MSU's Grounds Maintenance Department. "Couch, chair and coffee table, with the carpet underneath.

"More recently, the six-person beer bong. What's amazing is the number of charcoal grills people will leave - and they're more than just your basic hibachi. Occasionally, there's the deflated female mannequin left behind.

"We sell the same 70,000 tickets every year, but it's slowly taken on a life of its own," said Ratliff, whose sta ff is responsible for much of the post-game cleanup . "It takes over the life of the campus that day."

While it is easy to wonder why so many football fans fail to clean up after themselves, MSU social psychology professor Norbert Kerr said it is because people tend to conform to the crowd even when the crowd is behaving badly.

MSU junior Amanda Berrington agreed.

"Students throw trash everywhere, but they are OK with it because everyone else is doing it," she said. "I think the problem with tailgaters is it's a lot easier for people who don't litter to look around and see everyone else doing it, so it's not a problem for them to litter."

Pete Pasterz also agreed.

"You wouldn't ever think of doing that on your front lawn," said Pasterz, the manager of MSU's Office of Recycling and Waste Management. "Here, somehow, people feel like they have a license to drop things and run and someone will take care of it ... the societal inhibitions just aren't there in the setting we have."

It's possible that the societal inhibitions are somewhat impaired.

When MSU hosted Ohio State University on Nov. 6, tailgaters filled the campus parking lots at 9 a.m.   By 11 a.m., an hour before kickoff, the party was in full swing. Hundreds of fans - many of them holding bottles or cans of beer - lined Red Cedar Road to watch the Spartan Marching Band enter the stadium. A number of tailgates boasted impressively well-stocked bars. Not all drinkers appeared to be of legal age.

Whatever the reason, though, the end result - a trash-covered campus - is ugly.

"I think it's irresponsible," said Pete Lutz, a 30-year season-ticket holder from Kaleva, in Michigan's Manistee County. "It's ridiculous. It makes the college look bad, you know?"

Although the trash left outside the stadium tends to attract the most comment from alumni and other Spartan faithful, fans leave a lot of it inside the stadium, too. The MSU Concessions Department sold more than 600,000 items in Spartan Stadium during the 2004 football season. Because every item is packaged, each is a potential source of stadium trash.

A number of variables affect what's sold at the stadium's concessions stands.   If the weather's nice, football fans show up sooner and stay longer. They drink more water and less coffee. They eat more peanuts and fewer hot dogs.

However, one thing never changes: Fans leave much of their trash in the stands.

"I think it's an American, accepted practice - you go to a game or concert, and you put your trash under the seat," said Scott Goldstein, a Parkwood YMCA employee who helps direct the Sunday morning cleanup in the Spartan Stadium stands by local school groups that get paid $700 for their efforts.

"I go to about one game a year, and I put my trash in the trash can because I know it's one less thing I have to pick up the next day."

Regardless of where fans leave it, the trash ends up in a local landfill - at a cost to the MSU Athletic Department of $10.02 per cubic yard of compressed trash. (One cubic yard of compressed trash equals about three cubic yards of loose trash.) And while $8,000 to dispose of trash for one full football season doesn't mean much in a budget the size of MSU's, it's a cost that could be largely avoided.

A statistical sample of loose trash collected from 800 seats in the stadium after the MSU-OSU football game found that most of that trash could have been recycled or composted.

In fact, just 11 percent of the trash in the sample was truly trash.

The rest was pure potential.

"There's an actual paying market for ... most of the recyclable materials, plastic or paper," Pasterz said. "So the net economic gain would be $10.02 (per cubic yard) plus."

Plastic souvenir cups - the kind fans can take home, but apparently don't - and plastic water bottles comprised almost half of the trash in the sample.

"There's more perceived value of the souvenir cup at the first game than at later games," said Guy Procopio, assistant auxiliary manager for MSU's Concessions Department. And more souvenir cups get left in the stands after an MSU loss than after an MSU win. The Spartans lost to the Buckeyes, 32-19.

Fans in general seating generated the most trash, while fans in the student section generated surprising little. The type of trash they generated also varied.

Because Spartan Marching Band members are allowed only apples and bottled water during football games, they consume astonishing quantities of both. In fact, the student section was the only area of the stadium in which a measurable quantity of food waste was found - all apple cores, and all attributable to the band.

The band's water consumption likely skewed the sample. However, even with the student section removed from the sample, plastic water bottles still accounted for a significant portion of the stadium's trash.

MSU Concessions sold more than 66,000 souvenir cups and nearly 57,000 bottles of water during the 2004 football season, including more than 14,000 souvenir cups and almost 7,700 bottles of water at the MSU-OSU game.

Many Michigan environmental groups would like to see the state's bottle bill - one of just 11 in the nation - expanded to include bottled water.

"If water bottles had the same 10-cent deposit on them, you can imagine the scavengers carting away the problem," Pasterz said. "That's one potential solution."

Recyclable or compostable paper products followed plastic in the sample, comprising more than a third of the collected trash.

Foam was the final recoverable material that was found. Although it can be recycled, it has to be clean, a difficult proposition in a stadium. And replacing foam cups with more easily recoverable paper ones isn't as simple as it sounds. Cups have to be sturdy enough for fans to carry them from concessions stands to seats without the cups collapsing.

"I think the key here is it has to be a win-win situation," Procopio said. "I'm an environmentalist, but I'm also a realist. There has to be some value to the business.

The MSU Concessions Department has taken steps to reduce waste in the stadium. The department supplies unwrapped drinking straws in dispensers to eliminate thousands of paper wrappers. It offers ketchup and mustard in bulk containers at stands in the stadium concourse instead of providing purchasers with individual packets. And it supplies rolls of paper napkins at concessions stands instead of individual paper napkins in dispensers, since people tend to grab individual napkins by the fistful.

The department also recycles the cardboard boxes in which supplies are delivered, filling three to four Dumpsters per game.

And it donates unsold food to Lansing's Food Movers, which collects prepared and perishable food to feed the hungry. During 2004, t hat amounted to more than half a ton of Spartan Stadium leftovers, the equivalent of the combined body weights of the Spartans' five leading scorers - kicker Dave Rayner, running back Jason Teague, quarterback Drew Stanton, running back DeAndra Cobb and tight end Eric Knott.

"That's a lot of pizzas, a lot of hot dogs, a lot of kielbasas," said Phyllis Handley, who is the Food Movers' director. "It's a huge commitment ... because it means they have to reserve space in their cooler and make sure food safety is maintained.

"They could just throw it in the Dumpster, but they choose not to."

Despite the generous amount of trash generated by MSU and OSU football fans, the campus was clean again less than 24 hours after the game ended.

"I like this job because it combines three of the things I love - sports, being outside, and MSU," Ratliff said. "Clean up's just part of the job. I don't think there's anyone who gets a thrill out of cleaning up after other people."

Someone's got to do it, though, since so few fans can be bothered.

"No one knows who picks up after them, and frankly, no one cares," said Brian Weeks, an MSU sophomore.

"It eventually gets picked up, and that's all that really matters."

The entire environmental investigative reporting class contributed to this report.

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