Students participated in activities to promote awareness of sustainability on campus and their everyday lives, at the Let’s Talk TRASH (Together Rise and Serve Humanity) event held at the USU yesterday.
Unified We Serve transformed the USU into a festival of sustainability. Booths lined the Plaza Del Sol with activities and crafts to provide students with easy ‘green’ solutions done on campus and at home.
“(The event) not only makes you aware of organizations,” said Erika Martinez senior majoring in Deaf Studies and Chicano Studies. “These different things you can do easily at home.”
The organizations present included Associated Students (AS), Unified We Serve, Institute for Sustainability, the AS Environmental Affairs Committee, and Meet Each Need with Dignity (MEND). MEND is a community organization that helps low income families with food pantries and food gardens.
Greg Farmer, a junior criminology major, said he enjoyed the event. “The event made me learn a lot of stuff, while having fun,” he said.
The middle of the event featured the compost pile from the entire event. Students threw fruit peels and other non-recyclable products into an organic tablecloth, in the middle of the plaza, to be used as compost later.
Other activities at the information booths included creating wood frames decorated with scratch paper, ring toss with plastic bottles, a color-coded trash toss, a bottle toss, creating flower pots out of newspapers, decorating reusable shopping bags, and creating pencil pouches out of used milk cartons. Students also had to answer various trivia questions about environmental issues before participating in the events.
Before students could collect their free food and fruits, they had to complete the activities. Full-Clip a local group, performed their own songs and popular hits to entertain students at the event.
Justin Weiss, coordinator of Unified We Serve, said the event was organized to bring campus organizations together with students.
“Our intention is to spread the word on campus of sustainability,” Weiss said.
Sustainability is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” according to the CSUN Institute for Sustainability’s website.
Weiss said Unified We Served stacked trash from CSUN yesterday to give students illustration of waste used. As students walked to the event, the pile of trash caught their attention, before comparing it to compost at the event.
All of the supplies at the event were recyclable or compostable from the game props down to the air-filled balloons. “We wanted to promote the idea of how an event can be fully sustainable,” he said.
The inspiration for the ‘green event’ came from the freshman common reading book “Garbology.”
He said the event provides students with successful alternatives for having a sustainable world. White said the event was a success at raising environmental awareness because of the questions students asked.
Allie King, graduate student in Physical Therapy, said she enjoyed the ability to take things home. “You learn little ways to save the planet,” she said. “Little ways you might not think about.”
