Sustainability Day recycles ideas for new movement

By Katie Powers

With Buffalo Springfield playing in the background, members and friends of the GREEN Club worked together Friday using old bottles, red cups and recycled plastics to form sculptures and decorations displayed Wednesday, Oct. 25, at the first Campus Sustainability Day.

Santa Clara joined college campuses nationwide in hosting the first ever event, held exactly half a year away from Earth Day. The Environmental Studies Institute and the Grass Roots Environmental Efforts Now Club sponsored the event.

"Sustainability is definitely a way of living. It's a way of thinking," said junior James Hanold, co-president of the GREEN Club. "It's making choices in your everyday life to kind of think of how your actions are affecting and benefiting the environment."

The event was aimed to educate students and also promote Santa Clara's effort in sustainability, using resources in such a way as to conserve them for future generations.

The Sustainability Fair took place from 2 to 4 p.m. in Kennedy Commons, and groups from sustainable organizations tabled. Some companies represented were Silicon Valley Power, who gave out free energy-saving light bulbs, Santa Clara Farmers' Market, Ulistac Natural Area and GreenEmotors, a company that makes an electric moped that runs for 450 miles for just $1. Santa Clara groups included the GREEN Club, Bon Appetit Dining, Human Resources, Solar Decathlon, Santa Clara Community Action Program, Fair Trade Coalition and Unity Resident Minister Matt Smith, S.J., who showed students his collection of worms he uses to decompose his food waste.

Along with the fair, speakers from Sustainable Silicon Valley, an environmental action group, presented their work in the morning. A Sustainability Day webcast ran throughout the day, featuring case studies from other sustainable universities.

"Most people think that it's just environmental," said Lindsey Cromwell, sustainability coordinator for the environmental studies institute. "Sustainability is also about social equity and social justice, and also about economics and changing business."

GREEN club members also tried to illustrate the monetary value of recycling.

On Oct. 5, members of the GREEN Club went through the Santa Clara trash from a dorm dumpster taking a portion of the recycled materials from the trash. They took the bottles and cans to a recycling site where they received the California redemption value for each item, totaling about $45 for the materials.

Santa Clara alum Lauren McCutcheon, who helped the GREEN club with their organizational efforts for Sustainability Day, estimated that they could have received $100 that day if they had brought all of it.

According to Cromwell, over 270 tons of materials were recycled last year, but 1,080 tons of trash was thrown away. Cromwell said a recent trash audit found over 2,000 plastic and aluminum containers in one day's worth of trash from one residence hall.

"A lot of people might get turned off because they're going to think that it's an environmental thing and it's a hippie thing," Cromwell said. "But when you think about the broader picture, it applies to everyone basically."

Students were asked to participate in the sustainability pledge, asking to commit to one action in three categories, energy, waste production or sustainable habits.

The actions ranged from turning off lights when not using them to supporting more fair trade and organically grown products. About 65 students had taken the pledge by Wednesday.

The GREEN Club worked for weeks before the event to help make posters and sculptures from recycled materials. "You need to keep the world cleaner," junior Mark Mattson said while constructing a pterodactyl head. "It's just getting worse and worse."

McCutcheon has made a commitment to sustainability in her life. She lives in a sustainable house off-campus called Citrus. McCutcheon said the house could become a continuation for students living in the Cypress Residential Learning Community who want to move off campus but also continue to maintain a standard of sustainable living.

"We went through this technological revolution and we have everything we could ever need," she said. "So now our job is to figure out how we can use what we have."

Hanold said that the efforts should go beyond environmental studies students.

"I think that this mentality, this image that the school is trying to promote needs to infiltrate all parts of the campus and be implemented into the curriculum, not just for environmental studies students it has to reach business students, the engineers, it has to reach psychology students," Hanold said.

"We're at a time where we're finally understanding how much of the impact we're having on the environment. It's time that we make decisions responsibly in all sectors of society."

Contact Katie Powers at krpowers@scu.edu.