From Apr. 17-26, the Students Organized for Sustainability hosted Earth Week, a week-long environmental awareness initiative. This is the fourth year that the Students Organized for Sustainability has hosted Earth Week.
The week featured a wide variety of daily activities including: yoga in the garden, Waste Watchers, a student-run farmers market, a thrift exchange and the Earth Week Festival. Earth Week is a Students Organized for Sustainability event which included collaboration from Sharon Curry, the coordinator for sustainability and support services, the Facility Services office, the Trinity Bee Alliance, TU Fit and the Trinity Progressives.
Earth Week is a week-long event aimed at encouraging environmental sustainability on the Trinity campus, according to the co-presidents of SOS, Lindsey Yazbek and Samuel Simoneau.
“The goal of Earth Week is to raise awareness about environmental issues”¦the saying is “˜Treat every day as Earth Day'”¦this is like a fun way and an unintimidating way to promote environmental awareness on campus,” Yazbek stated.
Earth Week was first organized in 2012 by SOS and has become an annual event on the Trinity campus, according to Sharon Curry, the coordinator for sustainability and support services.
“In 2012, we decided to do a whole week. The whole goal is that every day should be Earth day. It’s not something that we can do once a year and hope that the planet is going to get better,” Curry said. “So we expanded it to a week. It gave us more opportunity to help share our message in a variety of venues that can reach different people.”
The Trinity campus has a low recycling rate of 12 percent according to Curry.
“Our total waste is the weight of our trash plus the rate of our recycling. Of that total number 12 percent went to recycling and the remainder went to the landfill,” Curry said. “Every water bottle makes a difference. It really does. Every little bit adds up. Every tangible action you takes matters.”
Simoneau explained how Earth Week encourages the Trinity campus towards sustainable solutions.
“The……popularly misinterpreted rule is that everyone’s heard of “˜reduce, reuse, recycle.’ There should be one word slipped in. It should be “˜reduce, reuse, then recycle’. You want to try to reduce as much as possible,” Simoneau stated.
The Earth Day Festival was the most anticipated event of the week, according to Yazbek and Simoneau. The festival included free plants in mason jars, live music, honey samples from the Trinity Bee Alliance and multiple tables of organizations promoting environmentalism.
Meghan Tang, a senior and biochemistry and molecular biology major, remarked on her experience at the festival.
“I really liked how we got to sample honey from the Trinity Bee Alliance. And there was a wide variety of things for us to do. I thought it was interactive and a great way to celebrate Earth Week,” Tang said.
According to Yazbek, the driving motivation of Earth Week is to make a difference on campus.
“As a group SOS has had a difference on campus and we have done things like Waste Watchers and the Community Garden is a really important thing for us,” Yazbek stated. “That really is our end goal as an organization””to make campus more sustainable.”
Curry explained how sustainability is possible on the Trinity campus with collective action.
“That’s the whole thing about sustainability. A lot of people see the problems, see the challenges that are facing us, and it’s so overwhelming. But individually, when we each just do a little something, collectively that can become very large,” Curry said.
