There can be a feeling of hopelessness when learning that seemingly harmless everyday decisions may harm the environment. Campus Sustainability Day aimed to ease that feeling offering students simple ideas to change their habits for the better.

Tables lined the Sierra Lawn for the Associated Students’ Campus Sustainability Day on Wednesday, Oct. 16. This event showcased sustainable practices used by campus organizations and provided students several ways to get involved.

Several organizations attended the event, including key services that help the campus function, such as Matador Eats, which oversees campus dining; Athens Services, responsible for waste management; Basic Needs Office and the Institute for Sustainability.

The tables offered pamphlets, games, specialty pins and stickers and information on how each organization practices sustainability. Attendees learned about campus services that support sustainability, ranging from something as simple as putting trash in the correct bin to using Matabites notification on the CSUN app, which alerts students to over leftover food from school events available for pick-up.

Matador Eats shared information about on-campus water fill locations for reusable bottles, statistics on new waste per pound compared to previous years and information on locally sourced ingredients in their restaurants. Go With The Flow gave out free reusable menstrual cups as part of the Menstrual Equity Initiative. Environmental-friendly menstruation products cut down on excessive waste from each cycle as opposed to non-biodegradable products that take years to break down.

A common thread among all of the tables was the emphasis on the environmental impact of everyday decisions. Sustainable Food Coordinator Mabel Delatorre at the Institute for Sustainability, who tabled at the event, believes that it is crucial for everyone to participate in practicing sustainability.

“Oh, it’s super important. It’s almost like dire—it is, because sustainability is something that impacts everybody throughout the world, whether you are one year old or 100 years old, sustainability is something that impacts us all from all walks of life. It’s something that we like to promote, because especially on the education side of the house, sustainability intersects with all career paths. No matter what your journey is, sustainability is going to cross that path,” said Delatorre.

Attendees were encouraged to visit as many tables as possible using Sustainability Bingo. Through Sustainability Bingo, attendees were given a bingo sheet listing all of the organizations tabling at the event and received a stamp from each table. Once they had collected five stamps, they received a free succulent. In addition to the free succulent, there was the option to sit and paint a pot for the new plant.

Getting students involved in sustainability on and off campus was an important goal of the event for Nicole Burgess, the Event Producer for the Sustainability Department. Burgess believes students should be passionate about taking care of their campus.

“I think they should care, because it keeps the campus a lot cleaner and it also helps, I guess, how CSUN runs in a way… the more unsustainable people are, the more it affects the world and then the more it affects [our] campus,” said Burgess.

“…There’s a lot of pride in, like, taking care of where you’re at, because if Cal State Northridge wasn’t one of the most sustainable within the CSU system, I feel like the campus would look a lot different. We’d have a lot less plants, because we’re one of the leading schools with agricultural diversity, as well as bee habitats… the campus would then just look a lot less aesthetic.”

For more information on how to get involved with campus sustainability, visit the CSUN Sustainability page.